tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-53143347763791498272024-03-13T17:20:31.133-07:00Design FaithMusings on design and/or faithKenneth Caldwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11877278524477312027noreply@blogger.comBlogger119125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5314334776379149827.post-24493330605851519912015-02-11T20:48:00.001-08:002015-02-12T11:03:14.633-08:00A New Online Home for Design Faith Blog<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">
I have moved the Design Faith blog to my relaunched website <a href="http://kennethcaldwell.com/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">kennethcaldwell.com</a> <wbr></wbr>where you'll find these writings in <a href="http://www.kennethcaldwell.com/category/essays/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">Essays</a>, <a href="http://www.kennethcaldwell.com/category/interviews/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">Interviews</a>, and <a href="http://www.kennethcaldwell.com/category/postcards/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">Postcards</a>. And more. </div>
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David Kerrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12385896080390516765noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5314334776379149827.post-8043463304445701182015-01-12T13:22:00.000-08:002015-01-12T13:22:42.668-08:00Going to Church for Charlie<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lucille Clerc @LucilleClerc<br />
Break one, thousand will rise<br />
#CharlieHebdo #JeSuisCharlie #raiseyourpencilforfreedom<br />
courtesy: http://hereandnow.wbur.org/ </td></tr>
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January 7, 2015
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The slaughter of 12 people in or near the French satirical magazine <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> is an attack on the freedom of the press, which is an attack on freedom. It is important that we don’t let it become anti-Islamic fodder for the right wing. It is critical that freedom-loving people stand in solidarity for a free press, for freedom of worship, and for some, freedom from worship.
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I don’t think that our enemy is religion itself. The desire for faith is part of the human condition. Extremism can be found in politics, religion, or an economic system. We need not look far to see extremist Catholics, Protestants, Hindus, Jews, and even Buddhists. It is generally agreed that Islamic extremists were responsible for the World Trade Center massacre, where thousands of lives were lost. However, Bush’s extremist political (and economic) views resulted in the loss of thousands of more innocent lives.
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So I was left with the question, what to do on this saddest of evenings?
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Well, weirdly enough, I went to church. Some folks have posted slogans against religion, comparing it to barbarism. I think extreme forms of any organized thought lead to barbarism. While Occupy brought extreme capitalism’s cruelty back into the limelight, think also of the horrors of extreme socialism. Marx was a genius, but Stalin’s and Mao’s forms of genocide must also be remembered.
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I have found great comfort in various religious spaces over my lifetime, including Buddhist zendos and Episcopal and Unitarian churches. And yes, even a Catholic cathedral or two. But I would never suggest that anybody else <i>should</i> find comfort there.
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My partner Paul says that he thinks church works best when there are just 12 people and they don’t need a building. We could have a long discussion about what defines a church or a faith community. But on this sad evening, I think it is the very human desire to connect our best selves to other people trying to do the same thing. And that’s what I found at church tonight, outside 88 Kearny Street, the offices of the French Consulate.
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A group of several hundred people gathered outside the building’s entrance around 7 p.m. Soon enough the police decided to close the street and moved the barricades out of the way. Although they were gruff when moving the metal fences, some people politely said, “Thank you.” This wasn’t an angry protest so much as a vigil. Generally, it was quiet except for the requisite police helicopter overhead. Men and women cried and hugged each other. Occasionally a group broke into French song and sometimes clapped. And there were several shouts of “Je suis Charlie.”
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The San Francisco fringe element was present—a man in Birkenstocks covered in a burka made from a rainbow flag. At the edges, it felt more like a Parisian café, people kissing each other on two cheeks, chatting in French, and of course, smoking. Towards the center, with the candles on the ground, the stillness was very moving in its pure quiet, in the power of mourning the tragedy together and recommitting ourselves to the concept of freedom.
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In addition to candles, there were many signs with the “Je suis Charlie” sentiment and hundreds of pens and pencils held aloft. This was not organized religion, but it was faith in humanity made visible. So I will call it church.
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For more graphic responses please see:<br />
<a href="http://www.designboom.com/art/artists-worldwide-respond-charlie-hebdo-tragedy-powerful-drawings-01-08-2014/?utm_campaign=daily&utm_medium=e-mail&utm_source=subscribers">http://www.designboom.com/art/artists-worldwide-respond-charlie-hebdo-tragedy-powerful-drawings-01-08-2014/?utm_campaign=daily&utm_medium=e-mail&utm_source=subscribers</a>
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<br />Kenneth Caldwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11877278524477312027noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5314334776379149827.post-3502432547441841812015-01-06T17:49:00.000-08:002015-01-06T17:49:29.373-08:00Setting It Up<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>An Interview with photographer J. John Priola - Part 1</b><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Triangle, 2014<br />
archival pigment print</td></tr>
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An exhibit of J. John Priola’s recent photographs just opened at the Paule Anglim Gallery. The show, “Nurture,” reveals the odd corners of the city where a tiny moment or strip of nature has been neglected or mistreated: a tree or bush growing out of control, or just the residue of nature lost.
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I met Priola last year and visited him at his home and studio in Glen Park to talk about his personal history and his work. At first we chatted about his experiences up to the time he began receiving recognition for his work. The second part of the interview will cover thoughts on specific images and series.
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<b>Q: Did you get interested in photography growing up?</b>
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J. John Priola: I was always interested in photography. My mom was a photographer. Well, she wouldn’t call herself a photographer, but she always photographed. She got a little Brownie camera and went to New York in the 1940s, I think, and took all these pictures. She always took slides of the family and trips to the mountains, because we lived in Colorado. So I just picked up the camera.
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<b>Do you remember the first photograph that you called a photograph?</b>
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Yeah. It was a photograph of a pair of my sister’s shoes. They were platforms, but black and not so chunky. The heel was a little more tapered.
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<b>Did they appeal to you aesthetically?</b>
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Well, yeah. I think I did little still lives with them. There was the inner leaf of—it might have from a B-52s record. It was green and black leopard print paper—the sleeve that the album fit in. I used that as a background for the shoes. It was a little setup. I wish I had that picture. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just taking a picture.
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<b>So did it keep going in high school?</b>
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No. I wasn’t encouraged in high school. Although I did make clay pots. I went to an all-boys Jesuit high school.
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<b>Wasn’t creativity encouraged there? The Jesuits have a reputation for encouraging the intellect.</b>
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But not for encouraging creativity. The art classes were in a trailer in the parking lot.
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<b>Did you come out here for undergraduate school?</b>
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No. I wasn’t encouraged to be an artist by my parents either. I grew up on a farm. I remember my mom loading the dishwasher and saying, “You know, you can paint the paintings when you get your own house.” The only time my parents were impressed with my being an artist was when I got in a show in Germany and I was flown to Germany and put up in a hotel. “Oh. Okay, that’s something.”
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<b>Did you show inclinations towards being an artist?</b>
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Everything I did…I was making something. When I had to irrigate the crops, I would build little houses along what I called a river and there would be floods, because it would erode, and disasters would happen. I was always making up stories, always drawing, rearranging my room. All of the clichés.
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<b>Was it subtle how they discouraged you?</b>
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I got derailed. You asked about the school. They wanted practicality. So instead of majoring in art originally, I went in with an open idea. Maybe horticulture, because I always liked to grow plants. I didn’t like to farm, which is a very different thing than growing things. Farming is such a hard job. It’s such hard work because you’re dependent on the weather. And in Colorado, it always hailed, and you had to irrigate all summer long. So practicality was an important thing. I went to Colorado State University in Fort Collins, which is an agricultural college. I ended up taking courses to be an occupational therapist. But I got halfway through that and realized kinesiology, neurology, chemistry, no. But I liked psychology, the thinking and the feeling part.
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So I transferred to Metropolitan State College in downtown Denver. I still kept doing my electives, and I took a photo class. I realized, “Oh man, this is it. This is making art.” Then I still couldn’t think that I wanted to be an artist, so I went into special education. Then I went into art therapy and said, “Fuck it. Just be an artist. It’s self-indulgent. Just do it.” So I finished my degree there. It took five years because I transferred.
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<b>Had your parents resigned themselves?</b>
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I think they were resigned.
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<b>And how did that twin with coming out?</b>
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I never thought about that until this very moment. But I bet part of my parents’ reservation was related to that, too. Maybe it’s just one and the same. I’ve never even separated them. It just all happened at the same time.
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<b>Tell me about some of your mentors.</b>
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The first photo teacher I had, Barbara Houghton—who I’m still in touch with—she was at Metropolitan State College. I think she’s in Kentucky now, teaching. She encouraged me to go to graduate school. There was also a woman named Jean Schiff. Jean was supportive, but in a whole opposite way. It was a drawing class. She would use my drawings as an example of what not to do. She would hang it up. “This is what you don’t do.”
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<b>How was that encouraging?</b>
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Well, it pissed me off. Like, “I know I can do it right.” I became insistent and committed that I was going to do it right. So I think between those two—good cop, bad cop—they showed me I could do it.
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<b>What subject matters were you exploring in school? </b>
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The easiest way to define it is when people think about photography, it’s this whole take and make—take photograph, make photograph. It went so quickly to making a photograph, never taking. I was never a street photographer. Never a documentarian. I would always set up pictures. I always had a hand in how things looked. And that’s changed lately, too. Because your hand doesn’t have to physically be there, but it’s how you construct things in a more open way.
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<b>So what were the early constructions?</b>
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When I was in college as an art major, I had a friend named Lily Rose, who was a transsexual, I believe. She was also a hairdresser and a DJ. There was this New Wave bar where she was a DJ. Wednesday nights were New Wave night at the Grove. It was so much fun to dress up, and I decided—just like Phil Oakey of the Human League—that I would wear high heels. So I started collecting spike heels from the thrift stores.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8OLBDYlgJHVz7nBBDJIzmk_IfQX-wtxEWfYe3BZftZaM2gOc2YGeVsN8i9J8rjzjh-nrd1S4z7_BW9jvwY3kyz7OC3bM-Pub0qGdd_-aiowiuUevIJSBT0WUtyGEgpK1rmkga_DWC4vn7/s1600/Heel+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8OLBDYlgJHVz7nBBDJIzmk_IfQX-wtxEWfYe3BZftZaM2gOc2YGeVsN8i9J8rjzjh-nrd1S4z7_BW9jvwY3kyz7OC3bM-Pub0qGdd_-aiowiuUevIJSBT0WUtyGEgpK1rmkga_DWC4vn7/s1600/Heel+copy.jpg" height="223" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Heel, 1981<br />
gelatin-silver print</td></tr>
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<b>That fit you?</b>
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Well, mostly. But then I just started collecting them because they looked good. I lived in this corner apartment that had lots of panes in the window, and I hung pairs of shoes in all the panes of the window. I had a huge collection of spiked heels. I started photographing those. I brought them to the steps of the Capitol Building. I brought them out to the farm and put them on the fence with the cows. My mom even helped. She held out a carrot to get the cow to come over near the spiked heels on the fence.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cows, 1982<br />
gelatin-silver print</td></tr>
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Then I thought I wanted to photograph people. Again, the typical cliché thing is people don’t ever show up. They’re busy. And what are you stuck with? You and your stuff. So I started doing self-portraits. “Self-portrait” is an odd use of the term. The pictures weren’t really about me. At the time, I wasn’t thinking it was a picture about me. It was just what I had, what I could do. But they were so indicative of what I was going through. It was acting for the camera and, oh, it’s embarrassing. Although I love looking at it—but it’s embarrassing at the same time. Such a cliché. Gay men. I had this calendar of Marilyn Monroe, and I cut out the pictures and I put them in a frame and hung it on the wall, and I posed in front of it and took pictures of me.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Documentation of work for grad school application.</td></tr>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzEhSPfGiCd9ouXicRm6ZIYte1l35lFF60U7darezHlHfXxIOiMS8ZFzfJIiVX_M4QLIcbejFKBmQsk5_Lk2FZB4ebMoQ0xOnZS_eEzT6G29OdRiu6qZXuAEgAi5Qhk31Vj2_TtDYdkYtm/s1600/MMMe2+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzEhSPfGiCd9ouXicRm6ZIYte1l35lFF60U7darezHlHfXxIOiMS8ZFzfJIiVX_M4QLIcbejFKBmQsk5_Lk2FZB4ebMoQ0xOnZS_eEzT6G29OdRiu6qZXuAEgAi5Qhk31Vj2_TtDYdkYtm/s1600/MMMe2+copy.jpg" height="216" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<b>The same pose?</b>
<br />
<br />
No, no. Different things. Acting out. But one of the shows that I had—Barbara had really encouraged me—my parents came to the show—I got rid of the Marilyn Monroe picture, but I had jewelry, gloves, and a mink collar. I did these shirtless, from mid-torso up with gloves, in color. I printed the picture small on it with white paper, but I would take a penlight flashlight and I would go around with color. It’s not digital. We’re way before digital. This is light.
<br />
<br />
Then I hung a grid of those up and I got a little glass shelf and I went through all the Vogue magazines and I tore out the scratch-and-sniff inserts. I had piles of scratch-and-sniff cards—so you were encouraged to sniff the perfume while you were looking at these pictures. I still think it’s a stroke of genius.
<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghpxmejKMhUAv_XljaSiF36H_T1iZ1r99a7LNJFl73Tymef_Tz5ZUmpSmiu-68qG5qWOEYkXYWA_eHPOkzIjwRN0aKZLjNQuQKgbM2STHWLoQBwHuM12dfaufIFT0UuYeW3YrZ4XkrMJNB/s1600/Scratch-n-sniff-Gloves+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghpxmejKMhUAv_XljaSiF36H_T1iZ1r99a7LNJFl73Tymef_Tz5ZUmpSmiu-68qG5qWOEYkXYWA_eHPOkzIjwRN0aKZLjNQuQKgbM2STHWLoQBwHuM12dfaufIFT0UuYeW3YrZ4XkrMJNB/s1600/Scratch-n-sniff-Gloves+copy.jpg" height="259" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Scratch-n-sniff Gloves, 1981<br />
c-print</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjD8W5uViOaF-pXiLhVC6K161Ki0Ve2Npsg4OzCBvbygbw4a6RBmMFipnR8scwbyQl07lBwSpOQpThKGHn18QuQhaEcQfusUrDJN3pUQLeNpmDOPGB9boU6wRRiJ6rZc8W1Tajrl7r9e2IJ/s1600/Scratch-n-sniff-Mink+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjD8W5uViOaF-pXiLhVC6K161Ki0Ve2Npsg4OzCBvbygbw4a6RBmMFipnR8scwbyQl07lBwSpOQpThKGHn18QuQhaEcQfusUrDJN3pUQLeNpmDOPGB9boU6wRRiJ6rZc8W1Tajrl7r9e2IJ/s1600/Scratch-n-sniff-Mink+copy.jpg" height="261" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Scratch-n-sniff Mink, 1981</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPOpsITIXv4iJSxGhlK3xCj8CM7jtQT5BBVYKPQBbXuMbXmsAmBjlr9C6_U0b7RghUWcnRasFsOtsL9iyQwAlXxrvAu_Y8fTwIc9BJO8W_EAyJERvgffGdz1R6sthUOgOnstbGaqbjHitl/s1600/Scratch-n-sniff-Braclet+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPOpsITIXv4iJSxGhlK3xCj8CM7jtQT5BBVYKPQBbXuMbXmsAmBjlr9C6_U0b7RghUWcnRasFsOtsL9iyQwAlXxrvAu_Y8fTwIc9BJO8W_EAyJERvgffGdz1R6sthUOgOnstbGaqbjHitl/s1600/Scratch-n-sniff-Braclet+copy.jpg" height="256" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Scratch-n-sniff Bracelet, 1981</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUlFghxaF4lQ4cApD1XG564adTlRcyiRbXiQzL41Jy35yonEQGCOykJIzxZG_20scLPC3M1WtkbbQgoFaFzpQ6Jnr6aB03oPlKJTYv5aUwVsENwXplyWsazriu64llQj5seByzu97K9aUs/s1600/Scratch-n-sniff-Necklace+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUlFghxaF4lQ4cApD1XG564adTlRcyiRbXiQzL41Jy35yonEQGCOykJIzxZG_20scLPC3M1WtkbbQgoFaFzpQ6Jnr6aB03oPlKJTYv5aUwVsENwXplyWsazriu64llQj5seByzu97K9aUs/s1600/Scratch-n-sniff-Necklace+copy.jpg" height="261" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Scratch-n-sniff Necklace, 1981</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>But were you clearly a male?</b>
<br />
<br />
Clearly. It wasn’t drag. It was more gender-fuck if anything. But that was not a term for me.
<br />
<br />
<b>Was your transgender friend an influence then?</b>
<br />
<br />
She definitely was.
<br />
<br />
<b>How did your parents react to these images? Did they say anything?</b>
<br />
<br />
No, they said nothing. In fact, it was more like they ignored it. But at the show, Barb was saying, “He’s really good. He’s really talented. He’s very thoughtful. He really needs to go to graduate school. He needs to go on.” She was very encouraging. And they let me go to school.
<br />
<br />
<b>So at the same time, they didn’t express negativity? </b>
<br />
<br />
No. I never got thrown out of the house. None of that, no.
<br />
<br />
<b>So then what did you do?</b>
<br />
<br />
Applied to grad school. I applied to CalArts, San Francisco Art Institute, Tyler School of Art, and Chicago Art Institute. And I got into the two California schools, none of the East Coast schools. I went and visited CalArts.
<br />
<br />
<b>Is that the one in Valencia?</b>
<br />
<br />
Yes. I think that’s a really good school. I could feel the energy at the time. But it reminded me of the Fort Collins campus, where there are dorms and Led Zeppelin blaring out of the dorm windows and beer cans in the parking lot. This is too much like Fort Collins, Colorado. Bye. I don’t care how good the school is, I can’t live in this environment. And the San Francisco Art Institute was in the city. I had no idea how the city had open arms at the time. It was a weird time, the mid-1980s.
<br />
<br />
<b>So you came here pretty much right away?</b>
<br />
<br />
Right out of undergrad.
<br />
<br />
<b>Your parents actually paid for it?</b>
<br />
<br />
Yes. While my dad was struggling as a farmer, raising field corn and sweet corn, my mom figured out, “I’m starting a tree nursery so when these kids are in college, these little blue spruce seedlings I’m planting will be big landscape-sized trees and we’re going to make some money for the kids.” And they did. That’s how we all went to school. You got to give her credit.
<br />
<br />
<b>Blue spruce trees?</b>
<br />
<br />
Yeah. So when they’re mature, they’re worth hundreds of dollars. It was smart. Because in small family farming, you don’t make a lot of money.
<br />
<br />
<b>So you came here in the mid-1980s, when AIDS had just hit. I wouldn’t say there was an antigay backlash here, but definitely there was a kind of hysteria. And people were getting sick. So that was a weird time to move to San Francisco.</b>
<br />
<br />
It was a hard time. But—this sounds very self-centered—grad school is a world in and of itself.
<br />
<br />
<b>Was it a two-year master’s degree?</b>
<br />
<br />
Yes. But it took all my time. I put all my energy into it. So yes, there was this whole AIDS crisis happening. Friends of friends were dying. But it was out there, it wasn’t here. I was focusing on school. There was only one other gay student in my year.
<br />
<br />
<b>In photography?</b>
<br />
<br />
Photography was very disciplined. It wasn’t interdisciplinary. We weren’t encouraged to mix with other folks. I figured this out three semesters in. “Wait a second. There’s this whole other school. There’s George Kuchar, for God’s sake, working down the hall. Something’s got to give here.” I realized, oh, for your tutorial, if you just get a faculty from another department to agree, you can just do it. They’re not paying attention. So I got some visiting faculty in film and other departments to work with me, and that was a godsend. Because it was outside photography.
<br />
<br />
Because at the time, I did a series of Henry VIII and his six wives, all with my face. I did it with collage and drawing things. So it was funny. Because it’s so crudely cut out and crudely drawn, but they were Holbeinesque—these tiny little things.
<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjR5jCzcB8JPOoxDeiWEySxLleyeK9E17hUE26eX5_10qEK_XFwwCkO1ElaOFG3IjFRec5CxZBHVgDi706zZb7jLQpZm0D0GqGXyWw48r-hbH4A4h0pTqB_q_D6n1HJ8zumpEmHAQT8iFYC/s1600/Priola_H8_Ha.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjR5jCzcB8JPOoxDeiWEySxLleyeK9E17hUE26eX5_10qEK_XFwwCkO1ElaOFG3IjFRec5CxZBHVgDi706zZb7jLQpZm0D0GqGXyWw48r-hbH4A4h0pTqB_q_D6n1HJ8zumpEmHAQT8iFYC/s1600/Priola_H8_Ha.jpg" height="320" width="262" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Henry VIII, 1984<br />
gelatin-silver print, collage, hand colored</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ0uxVWtoGAoJANN1r8pyvAtF3vMBpPbrzraROk2YL2qS6xEEYZ1iV9mWgQst0m5so99e_iX3L3uyb652A0fj8L69GaynurNXuaxNGLi7xJprLubGEkzudnq4e_MaVxGirkIiX_XJS2rLZ/s1600/Priola_H8_2a.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ0uxVWtoGAoJANN1r8pyvAtF3vMBpPbrzraROk2YL2qS6xEEYZ1iV9mWgQst0m5so99e_iX3L3uyb652A0fj8L69GaynurNXuaxNGLi7xJprLubGEkzudnq4e_MaVxGirkIiX_XJS2rLZ/s1600/Priola_H8_2a.jpg" height="320" width="265" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Katherine Howard, 1984</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijP0vns06vGb05KIV5LfJ0NL9tGJC1b9ap5GzVUn1d9Xdg42EN3sXeZ_VFTLudmRusBRSUI_UzMMO9N_NfOJMHUW2Tahaf5whRpZfLexgxCCPBqnnIRSYTyFroPA9UJ3opMxl3STL6N9P3/s1600/Priola_H8_ABa.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijP0vns06vGb05KIV5LfJ0NL9tGJC1b9ap5GzVUn1d9Xdg42EN3sXeZ_VFTLudmRusBRSUI_UzMMO9N_NfOJMHUW2Tahaf5whRpZfLexgxCCPBqnnIRSYTyFroPA9UJ3opMxl3STL6N9P3/s1600/Priola_H8_ABa.jpg" height="320" width="258" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Anne Bolin, 1984</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkwZUKtrwcfTSQf8HltLfJbWIVy6HlgOWXhUcJPCPJV00jcoHo93RiP3MqVSMJ28rQq-JYltEhhnA5XMw36HlqxEs-nzLmUS7nMR59RVfBrtiVSlRvN7N3_GQGn8EzNw0V1Fv-3bg-N9qc/s1600/Priola_H8_K2a.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkwZUKtrwcfTSQf8HltLfJbWIVy6HlgOWXhUcJPCPJV00jcoHo93RiP3MqVSMJ28rQq-JYltEhhnA5XMw36HlqxEs-nzLmUS7nMR59RVfBrtiVSlRvN7N3_GQGn8EzNw0V1Fv-3bg-N9qc/s1600/Priola_H8_K2a.jpg" height="320" width="262" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Anne of Cleves, 1984</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1SgpcMyFTD74WeNnXGCGNjHDMrWNlU5qg9dEpejfRnFEpW5h5z41KDe8ueVMcClh2N9sCUFHaC748v0cxJwGhsm2ER6UNBH0J_pcWWicg2-nGCbsGqCVrqeKr8txgBIMRXEaVEgW1Oo2P/s1600/Priola_H8_Ka.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1SgpcMyFTD74WeNnXGCGNjHDMrWNlU5qg9dEpejfRnFEpW5h5z41KDe8ueVMcClh2N9sCUFHaC748v0cxJwGhsm2ER6UNBH0J_pcWWicg2-nGCbsGqCVrqeKr8txgBIMRXEaVEgW1Oo2P/s1600/Priola_H8_Ka.jpg" height="320" width="254" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Catherine Parr, 1984</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Bringing it around to this AIDS epidemic, the man who helped me—I would buy the frames in a thrift store. He made them into the right size frames. He died so fast of AIDS—and so did his partner.
<br />
<br />
<b>Who was inspirational at the Art Institute?</b>
<br />
<br />
Larry Sultan. Hank Wessel. Linda Connor, but for all the wrong reasons. She’s a good friend. But when she was my teacher, she raked me over the coals. But her criticism about how the work was going and it’s so much about the cliché—it was a revelation. I realized, “Yes, it is about the cliché! That’s what I’m interested in.” That’s the nucleus—she was thinking that was the problem, but to me that was the solution.
<br />
<br />
<b>Did they give you philosophical feedback?</b>
<br />
<br />
With Larry, all the time. In fact, I would often be listening and I’d think, “You’re full of shit, aren’t you?” But he was thinking and feeling.
<br />
<br />
<b>So where did the work go, then, during those two years?</b>
<br />
<br />
It stayed on the self-portrait, and it stayed on this gender thing. But not drag.
<br />
<br />
<b>A farm boy from Colorado comes to San Francisco. Was that a sort of coming out, coming of age, finding out who you were as a gay person?</b>
<br />
<br />
I didn’t come in contact with HIV. I could have so easily, but I did not. I get quiet when I think about that. Like, how did that work?
<br />
<br />
<b>I’m curious about the self and the gender questioning as you’re coming of age in San Francisco. Are they connected?</b>
<br />
<br />
You know, I’ve thought about this, but not a whole lot. Like, why was that the issue? Why was I so drawn to that, playing both roles?
<br />
<br />
<b>Both roles?</b>
<br />
<br />
Male and female. I was reading Jung. I think that gave me permission, in a way. “Yeah, keep thinking about that boy-girl shit. No problem. It’s in there.” But I think it has to do with growing up on a farm and what you’re supposed to do as a man and what you’re supposed to do as a woman. About growing up in such a traditional way.
<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTuiRvBp71MbVtD94a1fqzYFKi-SQ4A4UDFWc7KFnmoX9hfu0f2jZLkxPT4sows-FbTDfBPy7R5hsPuXHTB_GDuk4vhPvAlU6ZBLFrX7IBiVcASDXpZuf_pPASqpLvUOiSonnEyUtVSEA7/s1600/kiss+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTuiRvBp71MbVtD94a1fqzYFKi-SQ4A4UDFWc7KFnmoX9hfu0f2jZLkxPT4sows-FbTDfBPy7R5hsPuXHTB_GDuk4vhPvAlU6ZBLFrX7IBiVcASDXpZuf_pPASqpLvUOiSonnEyUtVSEA7/s1600/kiss+copy.jpg" height="264" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">untitled, 1982<br />
c-print</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<b>When you don’t have a traditional mind.</b>
<br />
<br />
And you’re surrounded by it. I’m trying not to be judgmental about it, but my mom followed her husband across the country, Illinois to Colorado. Didn’t know a soul. Lived across the driveway from her new husband’s parents, who spoke Italian in front of her—she doesn’t speak Italian. You don’t do that now. But then, everybody was like, “Here’s what you do. This is the deal. The man does this, the woman does this.” I grew up with that formative thing. But I didn’t have that mind.
<br />
<br />
<b>What about your family? Did they buy into it?</b>
<br />
<br />
I have a sister who lives in Santa Fe. She went to Johns Hopkins—as far as she could from Colorado. She got a BS degree there, got a killer job at GE here in San Francisco. Bought a house. Was on her way. But I think she met some pushback as a woman—you know, it was the 1980s. So she found out about this guru and moved to India…the aligning of mind, body and spirit…that freaked my parents out.
<br />
<br />
<b>More than the gay thing, even?</b>
<br />
<br />
Yes. Because the gay thing, they could ignore it. How, I don’t know. I mean, look at me. I had a spiked heel collection.
<br />
<br />
<b>On their fence.</b>
<br />
<br />
On their fucking fence. Anyway, somehow they ignored it and fixated on my sister moving to India. But it was a little weird, because she was told to get rid of all of her possessions. And instead of getting rid of them, she would write on the back of photographs and mail them as postcards. Like, she wouldn’t really get rid of it. She’d be like, “You throw it out.”
<br />
<br />
<b>What was the work you were doing as you finished school? What were you looking at?</b>
<br />
<br />
It’s the gender roles again, and taking the Carl Jung one step forward where he’s not just saying anima and animus, but we’re everything. We’re our own hero, our own heroine, our own saboteur, the whole thing. Instead of doing these black and white typical home photographs, where the woman is cooking at the stove and the man is yelling at the table, or they’re sitting in the little bench all happy, I am doing black and white constructive images I took of classical paintings—like the Tintoretto painting of Bacchus and Venus—and I have set up the scene. What I didn’t photograph, I would draw in. I hand colored, and I worked at a big scale. At that time, there was no Photoshop. It was all done with collage. I would do it on a small scale, rephotograph it with a poor 4x5 camera, and then recolor it. That’s what I was doing as I was leaving school.
<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVVcO1Wg97qUpfhTQwdKCLlbbZoEWgGLzcq_GC1wzAVfMBTQ-D7aHqEAEbZQm-X4VX9uAuUsF3jwn-W80ZYltlfwAdzcu7MoyDoGjy6lUgwppuF7JLR6Oqg4Clfn7So4e-jZV14dgjrKT2/s1600/ABVpp.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVVcO1Wg97qUpfhTQwdKCLlbbZoEWgGLzcq_GC1wzAVfMBTQ-D7aHqEAEbZQm-X4VX9uAuUsF3jwn-W80ZYltlfwAdzcu7MoyDoGjy6lUgwppuF7JLR6Oqg4Clfn7So4e-jZV14dgjrKT2/s1600/ABVpp.jpg" height="304" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ariadne Bacchus and Venus, 1988<br />
gelatin-silver print, hand colored</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjENzgDHkLvQR1AWQh8_mOo1i1i1IC64FIkSpoKZAlQOhQwXDO7bD8i9iFGpmKe2nlfqpvRX0GDcN2Us2tcp1zUEu1SUteMNciQ83v0uG8l_A6XpmvowmUSCj5fNkuQqiGE6K46yUtdNpPw/s1600/Priola_EW_STA.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjENzgDHkLvQR1AWQh8_mOo1i1i1IC64FIkSpoKZAlQOhQwXDO7bD8i9iFGpmKe2nlfqpvRX0GDcN2Us2tcp1zUEu1SUteMNciQ83v0uG8l_A6XpmvowmUSCj5fNkuQqiGE6K46yUtdNpPw/s1600/Priola_EW_STA.jpg" height="211" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">St. Katherine, 1988</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIszpsfYecX2amerTb5njKJ4SWt56pGgXuov8BQLwFXPKSXdaVN5MgCiDPSbNGpxnGeJ9U4yWKcpo-QWRAFMJJ-NvNO36YnOJngSoXWcx6BZhcClJ6GT7QJTdhrfs4RbPoUdHy_FKhF0l8/s1600/Rubens.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIszpsfYecX2amerTb5njKJ4SWt56pGgXuov8BQLwFXPKSXdaVN5MgCiDPSbNGpxnGeJ9U4yWKcpo-QWRAFMJJ-NvNO36YnOJngSoXWcx6BZhcClJ6GT7QJTdhrfs4RbPoUdHy_FKhF0l8/s1600/Rubens.jpg" height="320" width="304" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ruebens, 1988</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<b>What do you do with an MFA in photography?</b>
<br />
<br />
I worked three jobs, and one of them was silk screening and another one was picture framing—which ended up being a 25-year gig. But that dovetailed with the photography, because it’s always allowed me to finish my work in the way I want to finish it.
<br />
<br />
<b>And your work was often dependent on the frame?</b>
<br />
<br />
Always. When I started to get noticed as an exhibiting artist here, I feel it was more like a sculpture. I didn’t ever sell just a print. It was framed. Always. That was kind of the deal.
<br />
<br />
<b>Where did you work as a framer?</b>
<br />
<br />
It’s called Spot Design. It still exists. Tamara Freedman still runs it, and she became like a third sister to me, working for her all these years. She’s an artist herself but didn’t pursue the exhibiting career, but became a picture framer extraordinaire.
<br />
<br />
<b>When did people begin to notice you?</b>
<br />
<br />
At that time, in the late 1980s, this was a different town and a much different art world. There was New Langton Arts, Southern Exposure, Intersection for the Arts, SF Camerawork. All of these places were interested in emerging artists. You could send in an application, and if you were a good artist, you would get a show, a solo exhibition. My first show was at Intersection. Then I got into a group show at the Vorpal Gallery. They had a new director they hired that thought, “Let’s look at some of these new MFA graduates, and let’s have a show.” I think they never wanted to do that again. We were crazy.
<br />
<br />
After a show, you would be asked to donate a piece for an auction. A catalog would get made and make it around. Jeffrey Fraenkel saw an SF Camerawork catalog, and I was doing these round pictures, and he gave me a show.
<br />
<br />
<b>Tell me about the round pictures.</b>
<br />
<br />
Well, they’re in here, mostly, but they’re little still lives like that. Little setups of singular objects.
<br />
<br />
<b>I’m interested in this work, how you decide on one image or another.</b>
<br />
<br />
It started out with truisms, kind of like Jenny Holzer, in a way. Life’s a bowl of cherries, the brass ring, the golden egg. So I would write that down, and I would visualize it first. And if it still made me feel good or—I don’t know what the feeling is—still felt that little burning, I would then set up the thing and photograph it. I think why they were still lives is because I never was a street photographer. I never wanted people to watch me photograph. I never wanted people to watch me at all.
<br />
<br />
I’d set the picture up, and I had a rule. It was three days or something. If I read the word and it still was interesting in three days, then I would do it.
<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ98ZF7kXaq6gQcGXOFlHy3At0BIAKd2Vi-bbviJsqR5R9p01ISeFeuzU5oMP3dGXBCdMaljczrHSwDJuDzNeh2EIhJL-TsBSrwKrWZHwt_qFVORJnl8lmp51NO4YRGXwb5wsaG9N-QU5H/s1600/P_Cherries.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ98ZF7kXaq6gQcGXOFlHy3At0BIAKd2Vi-bbviJsqR5R9p01ISeFeuzU5oMP3dGXBCdMaljczrHSwDJuDzNeh2EIhJL-TsBSrwKrWZHwt_qFVORJnl8lmp51NO4YRGXwb5wsaG9N-QU5H/s1600/P_Cherries.jpg" height="320" width="308" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cherries, 1993<br />
gelatin-silver print</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS_NRwtSE4wRcselieah0dt4nqODHq5KNF-MOrjxVv6TQJVu1M98L138uKmhUy5jOSDlYdod63czTG_bI_1hBScAZ1UV6QwdLi_tKjHNPnIwyvfiYUmOclISmTuKX_AkyZNu1JvJft1MTu/s1600/P_Dice.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS_NRwtSE4wRcselieah0dt4nqODHq5KNF-MOrjxVv6TQJVu1M98L138uKmhUy5jOSDlYdod63czTG_bI_1hBScAZ1UV6QwdLi_tKjHNPnIwyvfiYUmOclISmTuKX_AkyZNu1JvJft1MTu/s1600/P_Dice.jpg" height="320" width="308" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dice, 1993</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQ3sVQRx-iq7TH_PP3NDIkIVuz-9-_Wcj6k3wo9YehsyaKR06nennjxsD9OfpJJLnjIjcdlxqpmk9Z-wYV78cc5kL7WcmEaozPVifLJRnRP10xbHIuI51lVTw-ezoKqw4haRSc2ugRthcX/s1600/P_Hole.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQ3sVQRx-iq7TH_PP3NDIkIVuz-9-_Wcj6k3wo9YehsyaKR06nennjxsD9OfpJJLnjIjcdlxqpmk9Z-wYV78cc5kL7WcmEaozPVifLJRnRP10xbHIuI51lVTw-ezoKqw4haRSc2ugRthcX/s1600/P_Hole.jpg" height="320" width="308" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hole, 1993</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<b>So Fraenkel saw a piece in a catalog and gave you a show?</b>
<br />
<br />
I was riding an elevator in 49 Geary. He rode up to his gallery up with me, and he knew who I was. I think it was because Tamara framed for Fraenkel. I knew who he was. And he said, “I really like your piece in the catalog.” “Oh, thank you very much. There’s more. Would you like to see them?” “Okay.” So I showed him.
<br />
<br />
<b>Then he gave you an exhibition?</b>
<br />
<br />
A summer exhibition, which, you know, that’s always the easy way to try somebody out. But people did pay attention. And I had three shows there over several years.
<br />
<br />
<b>When did digital come in?</b>
<br />
<br />
I totally ignored it until about seven years ago. My film stopped being made. It was a Polaroid positive and negative film, Type 55.
<br />
<br />
<b>What did you do?</b>
<br />
<br />
Tried to reinvent myself, tried to use a different medium. I just kicked and screamed. Then I realized, “I have to embrace this digital thing.” It’s not so bad now. It’s like oil painting and acrylic painting.
<br />
<br />
<b>So how do you print the photographs?</b>
<br />
<br />
Digitally. I do use the darkroom for black and white. Anything color is digital. If it’s black and white, it’s all analog. Still a wet process. Film, silver print. If it’s color, I don’t even use film. Just straight digital. A lot of artists still use color film, scan it, and then print it digitally. But I don’t want to attach myself to another film and then have it taken off the market again.
<br />
<br />
<b>Do you print the digital prints yourself?</b>
<br />
<br />
Yes. It’s not the fanciest printer. In fact, it’s outdated, but it works. By the time you buy and learn your piece of equipment, it’s obsolete. I also have the luxury of being able to print at school, but I hate it because there are students around.
<br />
<br />
<b>It’s not private. How did you start teaching at the Art Institute?</b>
<br />
<br />
You know, it was kind of funny. I think people go to graduate school because they want to be an artist or they want to teach. That’s why they get an MFA. But if you are going to teach, you make your career as a teacher. You need to put a ton of energy into getting that teaching job and doing it. Or you put a ton of energy into your art career, and then you’re asked to teach. Hank, my former instructor, asked me to teach a class. Frankly, it’s because there was a cancellation. Somebody bailed at the last minute. “Who are we going to get? Who do I know? Oh yeah, I’ll call him.” I got a call on a Thursday, “Class is starting next week.” That was 1996, I think.
<br />
<br />
<b>So were you doing framing and teaching and making art?</b>
<br />
<br />
I was. I never framed five days a week. I think I did it four, three, and then two, and then bye-bye.
<br />
<br />
<b>Let’s go look at some pictures.</b>
<br />
<br />
In Part Two, Priola discusses the process behind some specific works.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2cWjfhJoXHiaaO5Zf-iXLjGyAynZtoSGvPaDKoUZgwF5ZTf8gecnyQpiU2A11r2uv426TAq5OstLjDGUsXoHfrfixnTOMJYOvsDV8F-w-OiA88RR0iQP2aLGjXv1ci17n-OKX2WqQNIwH/s1600/Priola_H8_1a.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2cWjfhJoXHiaaO5Zf-iXLjGyAynZtoSGvPaDKoUZgwF5ZTf8gecnyQpiU2A11r2uv426TAq5OstLjDGUsXoHfrfixnTOMJYOvsDV8F-w-OiA88RR0iQP2aLGjXv1ci17n-OKX2WqQNIwH/s1600/Priola_H8_1a.jpg" height="320" width="267" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Henry VIII, base image, 1984<br />
gelatin-silver print</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
Kenneth Caldwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11877278524477312027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5314334776379149827.post-63471062170134702652015-01-05T14:31:00.000-08:002015-01-05T14:31:46.590-08:00Best of 2014Once again it’s time to put up that totally arbitrary list!
<br />
<br />
<b>Best Bow Ties</b>
<br />
Dap Kitsch
This young fellow makes really handsome and reasonably priced bow ties. Found him at the otherwise uninspired Union Square Christmas market.
<a href="https://www.etsy.com/shop/dapkitsch">https://www.etsy.com/shop/dapkitsch</a>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLU6Vl5WuSPJI2dqy6wA2renB4CvSrTZFDfK1G8ewRof_dTWWjfp6q_-nu6SkwroDLDlTGufHvVuMJ8UR_t8vPqFsWyb5kUFftJdFIq_J9gGUUJJzYtI-A3mmCxJVfHrq3r92x44Z4_wBu/s1600/Dap+Kitsch.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLU6Vl5WuSPJI2dqy6wA2renB4CvSrTZFDfK1G8ewRof_dTWWjfp6q_-nu6SkwroDLDlTGufHvVuMJ8UR_t8vPqFsWyb5kUFftJdFIq_J9gGUUJJzYtI-A3mmCxJVfHrq3r92x44Z4_wBu/s1600/Dap+Kitsch.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZOr00PwVc6QrSjRx7ypVRFKWF4PjDBC5ENNvXxqJFTO6_Apn0K4loZqToRYY9MpVCIHcjiVtEUp0fHwLpNCo1BmP5oxco-gyDdOFgD1lDIQWugwkWyRxU0Hkv-pNFQi1qomBC_b9o0Nob/s1600/dapkitsch-tie.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZOr00PwVc6QrSjRx7ypVRFKWF4PjDBC5ENNvXxqJFTO6_Apn0K4loZqToRYY9MpVCIHcjiVtEUp0fHwLpNCo1BmP5oxco-gyDdOFgD1lDIQWugwkWyRxU0Hkv-pNFQi1qomBC_b9o0Nob/s1600/dapkitsch-tie.jpg" height="191" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<b>Best Massage</b>
<br />
I had a great masseur in SF but he moved locations. So I found this guy who treats massage like a dance. Something to look forward to every month!
<a href="http://deepesalenmassage.com/">http://deepesalenmassage.com/</a>
<br />
<br />
<b>Best Design Book</b>
<br />
Leslie Williamson’s “Modern Originals.”
<a href="http://www.lesliewilliamson.com/modern-originals/">http://www.lesliewilliamson.com/modern-originals/</a>
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<br />
<b>Best Design Workshop</b>
<br />
From Leslie’s book.
<a href="http://www.werkstaette-carlauboeck.at/">http://www.werkstaette-carlauboeck.at</a>
<br />
<br />
<b>Best Mysteries set in France (tie)</b>
<br />
This year I read four mysteries set in Provence by M.L. Longworth. Even Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems make a brief appearance!
<br />
<br />
Also found a new series by Peter Steiner that predicts all that CIA nastiness!
<br />
<br />
<b>Best Book of Love Letters</b>
<br />
Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy
I keep reading everything that comes out by or about them!
<a href="http://us.macmillan.com/theanimalslovelettersbetweenchristopherisherwoodanddonbachardy/christopherisherwood">http://us.macmillan.com/theanimalslovelettersbetweenchristopherisherwoodanddonbachardy/christopherisherwood</a>
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<br />
<b>Best Garden</b>
<br />
Le Jardin Plume
It took us a while to find this paradise on the edge of Normandy. Never travel without an atlas. But the detour was worth it all. One of the most beautifully conceived modern gardens we’ve been to.
<a href="http://lejardinplume.com/">http://lejardinplume.com/</a>
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<br />
<b>Best Restaurant Outside the US</b>
<br />
La Pramil in Paris.
Ran into our friends Anne Fougeron and Mark English in Paris and found this gem without a reservation. My starter was white asparagus soup with foie gras ice cream. Last meal before the revolution!
<a href="http://www.pramil.fr/">http://www.pramil.fr/</a>
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<br />
<b>Best House Museum</b>
<br />
Just before lunch with we visited Le Corbusier’s apartment and studio in Paris with Sofie Nunberg, Anne, and Mark. Only open on Saturdays. Must see! <a href="http://www.fondationlecorbusier.fr/">http://www.fondationlecorbusier.fr</a><br />
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<b>Best Thai Restaurant</b>
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We ate at a great Thai restaurant called Au Petit Thai. They don't seem to have a website. Here is their info.
10 Rue du Roi de Sicile, 75004 Paris, France
+33 1 42 72 75 75<br />
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<b>Best Recipe</b>
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Rachel Ray’s carrot soup. But put in mild cayenne, not hot cayenne.
<a href="http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/rachael-ray/curried-carrot-soup-recipe.html">http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/rachael-ray/curried-carrot-soup-recipe.html</a>
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<b>Best Concert</b>
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Thanksgiving Concert at St Paul’s Church in London conducted by Andrew Carwood. It featured Paul’s commissioned piece, “Psalm 30” sung beautifully by the Choir of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
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<b>Best New Shoes</b>
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My Alden slip-ons
<a href="http://www.aldenshoe.com/">http://www.aldenshoe.com</a>
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<b>Best Spice Shop</b>
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We don’t shop that much but we found this local spice shop a few blocks from our house and it’s got me back in the kitchen. A must visit. Oaktown Spice Shop
<a href="https://squareup.com/market/oaktown-spice-shop">https://squareup.com/market/oaktown-spice-shop</a>
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<b>Best Art Exhibit</b>
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Ai WeiWei on Alcatraz. And it’s there until April 26, 2015
<a href="http://www.for-site.org/project/ai-weiwei-alcatraz/">http://www.for-site.org/project/ai-weiwei-alcatraz/</a>
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<b>Best Art Exhibit in NY</b>
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There were quite a few. But Robert Gober was the most thought provoking. Not pretty like the Matisse or Cubist knock-outs but a lot of new information to think about.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Robert Gober<br />Untitled 1992<br />courtesy www.moma.org</td></tr>
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<b>Best Quirky Exhibit</b>
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Maynard and Lu Lyndon’s show of baby rattles at their shop, Placewares, in Gualala.
<a href="http://www.placewares.com/category/gallery/">http://www.placewares.com/category/gallery/</a>
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<b>Best Private Club</b>
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OK, let’s be honest we don’t get invited to very many private clubs. But Two Brydges in London is basically a hang-out for folks in the performing arts. Great food, mismatched chairs, and adorable waiters. Thank you Paul Hughes!
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<b>Best Swimming Lake within a Short Driving Distance</b>
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Emerald Lake above Redwood City. It’s also private, but not fancy. You feel like you drove several hours to hang out in Andirondack chairs and jump off diving boards into cold green water. Perfect on a hot summer day.<br />
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<b>Second Best Lake within a Short Driving Distance</b>
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Lake Anza in Tilden Park. It’s public and there is a nice sandy beach and a snack bar, but the water is a bit murkier…
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We live on Lake Merritt but you can’t swim there.
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<b>Favorite Asian/Tribal Rug Store</b>
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The Claremont Rug Company has some of the most beautiful rugs in the Bay Area. But if you don’t have a big budget for antique rugs you might check in at Emmet Eiland and some of their new tribal rugs. Good prices, no pressure.
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<b>Best Chinese Food</b>
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Mission Chinese
Clean up a funky Chinese restaurant, turn off the lights, shrink and freshen up the menu, and Bob’s your uncle.
<a href="http://missionchinesefood.com/">http://missionchinesefood.com/</a>
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<b>Best Documentary</b>
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CitizenFour about, you guessed it, Edward Snowden.
<a href="https://citizenfourfilm.com/">https://citizenfourfilm.com/</a>
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<b>Best New News Source</b>
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What happens when you bring a billionaire together with several very determined journalists? Well, I can only imagine the chaos, but most days you get something very interesting from The Intercept!
<a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/">https://firstlook.org/theintercept/</a>
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<b>Best Snow Globe</b>
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OK, I am not a big snow globe fan. But our pals Liz Ross and David Westby create something really different. Check them out at:
<a href="http://coolsnowglobes.com/">http://coolsnowglobes.com</a>
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<b>Best Air BnB in New York</b>
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Found this charming apartment in Manhattan. It is four long blocks from the Lexington subway, but the linens are marvelous and so is the morning light.
<a href="https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/825732?euid=f92852da-0e60-f6e9-c3d2-56f57213deee">https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/825732?euid=f92852da-0e60-f6e9-c3d2-56f57213deee</a>
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<br />Kenneth Caldwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11877278524477312027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5314334776379149827.post-16254446218338243682014-12-26T14:55:00.000-08:002014-12-26T14:55:19.600-08:00A Hero Goes Dark<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">New model of Berkeley Art Museum<br />
by Diller Scofidio + Renfro</td></tr>
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Sunday, December 21, 2014, was last call for the Berkeley Art Museum. The fan-shaped concrete structure swept this boy off the street and held him for a long time. Mario Ciampi’s building from 1970 was full of surprises for a 12-year-old and still offers delight for the 56-year-old. Stairways, ramps, elevators, light, and concrete provided an excellent background for art that was confounding, challenging, and inspiring.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bancroft Avenue elevation</td></tr>
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Our parents were not especially adventuresome, but they did take us to New York, DC, and Montreal in 1967. The visual wonders of that trip have stayed with me forever. And a few years later, they took us to the new museum in Berkeley, where we saw Claes Oldenburg’s melting plugs and soft food. My parents were measured in their comments, not wanting to influence us one way or another. Having seen the Guggenheim’s fantastic spiral on our trip a few summers before prepared us for a building that was all about space and light. Some of the art we saw back east also got us ready to see everyday objects anew, but maybe didn’t prepare us for pop art that was so soft, so sensual, so real.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A few Hans Hofmanns<br />
<a href="http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/hofmannbyhofmann">http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/hofmannbyhofmann</a></td></tr>
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A few years later, in high school, I made dozens of visits with friends to the museum (it was free for students!) and spent a lot of time with the Hans Hofmann paintings, which were then in the top floor gallery. I hadn’t read about his ideas about push and pull and planes, but I was overwhelmed by the sharpness of his colors. One piece, just one shade of flesh pink, was easier to look at because his exploration was so much simpler for my developing aesthetic. It was here that I saw my first works by Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko, and Sam Francis. All lessons in color, space, and meditation.
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The Berkeley Art Museum took risks and filled in gaps. Some shows, like the Juan Gris exhibit, were traditional in their presentation but gave me a whole chapter beyond Picasso and Braque that I had missed. Other shows used the building’s architecture to great effect, like Robert Irwin’s light sculpture in 1979. More recently, in 2012, the Barry McGee show filled the center with graffitied vehicles and a clubhouse. Most of the visitors I observed were asking what all this junk was doing in a museum. For the Kurt Schwitters show, the museum reconstructed Merzbau, a fantastic environment that existed in the artist’s flat in Hanover.
<a href="http://designfaith.blogspot.com/2011/09/art-mind-kurt-schwitters-and-create-at.html">http://designfaith.blogspot.com/2011/09/art-mind-kurt-schwitters-and-create-at.html</a>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pals Yosh Asato, David Baker, and Bruce Damonte</td></tr>
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In the middle of the 1990 culture wars, Lawrence Rinder (then curator, now director) put on “In a Different Light.” It was not a show of gay artists exactly, but a show of gay sensibility organized around the themes of Void, Self, Drag, Other, Couple, Family, Orgy, World, and Utopia. Established artists and works from the collection were included along with emerging artists. It was a bold and brave step for a young curator.
<a href="http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/InaDifferentLight">http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/InaDifferentLight</a>
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Perhaps my favorite show was the Joe Brainard retrospective in 2001. He was inspired by both Schwitters and Gris. And he was fearless. His small, careful collages were controlled yet often erotic, while some of his sculptures, most famously his Prell extravaganza, seemed to explode fully formed. He passed away from AIDS in 1994. He often gave his work away to friends. While he had a critical and mischievous eye, his work always seemed to hold a message of love.<br />
<a href="http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/brainard">http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/brainard</a>
<a href="http://queersage.blogspot.com/2012/11/i-love-joe-brainard.html">http://queersage.blogspot.com/2012/11/i-love-joe-brainard.html</a>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stephen De Staebler thrones and ottomans left out in the rain.<br />
<a href="http://www.stephendestaebler.com/">http://www.stephendestaebler.com/</a>
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I feel like this space was perfect for art spectacles. It was a gift that allowed you to see art and also see space, and sometimes the two seemed to merge. The university may keep the building, but given their prior clumsy attempts to mitigate its structural and water defects, their track record isn’t very good. I think that architect Mario Ciampi and founding director Peter Selz gave the university a building that was larger than its institution.
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<br />Kenneth Caldwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11877278524477312027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5314334776379149827.post-83995297461958834222014-12-05T09:00:00.000-08:002014-12-05T09:00:03.718-08:00Part Two: Design Radicals: What Does It Mean Now?<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhl1SmF050qMzOWVZ-tdYp_-FGGBJZWdWDw9M535aLp02o7HVGlMBvr0h03vSb0YOVHS-QjyDaUHiUzxIhEA16-o_vab2ndMspC738_ABBjWC7V8K_sI1xCvX13noRppNDovTec6mCXD8pd/s1600/Eagle+van+++radical+recycling.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhl1SmF050qMzOWVZ-tdYp_-FGGBJZWdWDw9M535aLp02o7HVGlMBvr0h03vSb0YOVHS-QjyDaUHiUzxIhEA16-o_vab2ndMspC738_ABBjWC7V8K_sI1xCvX13noRppNDovTec6mCXD8pd/s320/Eagle+van+++radical+recycling.png" width="248" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Farallones Institute's radical recycling project<br />
courtesy: Jim Campe</td></tr>
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The first part of the interview with Greg Castillo looks at the “Design Radicals” exhibit that he cocurated for the University of California, Berkeley. This second part looks at the legacy of these efforts and what they might portend for the future.
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<b>Interviewer: I want you to try and put this brief shining moment in a larger context.</b>
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Greg Castillo: The “Design Radicals” show is part of a larger research project trying to understand the role of Berkeley as a nexus of countercultural design. Currently, I’m putting together some ideas and writing an article for a catalog for an exhibition that’s being put together by Andrew Blauvelt at the Walker Art Center called “Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia.”
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That show really is the first venture to elevate hippie cultural production as something that we can study as a facet of modernism. My contribution for the catalog is an essay, which I’m calling “Counterculture <i>Terroir</i>: California’s Hippie Enterprise Zone.” My organizing idea for that piece is that Northern California, with Berkeley occupying an important position, was this nation’s (and thus the world’s) preeminent nexus of networked countercultural enterprises. Richard Florida has argued that San Francisco became a premier “creative class” enclave because some key attributes were present—talent, tolerance, and technology. The same Bay Area resources yielded an amazing variety of experiments in counterculture design. Of course, you had San Francisco as a pilgrimage site for hippies from all over the world. And even though things got ugly there after 1967 and the Summer of Love, that very crisis increased Berkeley’s importance as a haven for hippie enterprises.
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<b>Interviewer: Berkeley replaces San Francisco as a counterculture center?</b>
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Castillo: As an intellectual center and also a very political center of alternative culture, Berkeley became much more important after the Summer of Love. When hippies who were living in the Haight saw what was happening there, many of them got turned off and moved to Telegraph Avenue. They made the street one of the Bay Area focal points of countercultural activity, as we see with the subsequent “guerilla gardening” that created People’s Park.
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The university had a special role to play in this. It’s a place that had an enormous amount of brainpower that was also politically galvanized and open to countercultural activities. For example, in Berkeley, a “pharmaceutical dilettante” named Augustus Owsley Stanley III looked up the recipe for LSD in the Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Library, perfected it, and started producing it in a home lab in Orinda. He was the Henry Ford of psychedelics transport, providing the transport mechanism for the Summer of Love. You also have people like Sim Van der Ryn, whose position—with one foot in academia and the other in the counterculture—allowed him to write grants to federal funding agencies and get resources to conduct social research and building experiments. And you had an inexhaustible supply of students—a human resource of very committed people willing to labor for close to nothing on projects they identified with quite passionately.
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I’m currently trying to track down web of enterprises that spread out from or crossed paths with Berkeley. I want to map this countercultural network, this hippie regional enterprise zone, that flourished here in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
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<b>Interviewer: But don’t you think that there’s a split between the work of this Wurster Hall political poster factory and some of these later enterprises? Because they get co-opted into the mainstream via institutions like the <i>Whole Earth Catalog</i> or Esalen. Even Sim becomes the state architect during Jerry Brown’s first term! They don’t challenge the dominant narrative but end up going mainstream.</b>
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Castillo: That’s a narrative I reject. I don’t buy the argument that Stewart Brand’s <i>Whole Earth Catalog</i> was hopelessly compromised by its relationship to American consumer culture or its military connections. Energy-conscious architecture certainly goes mainstream with Sim’s program of energy-efficient state office buildings for Jerry Brown, for example, but that’s far from complicity with the dominant narrative of U.S. energy use. This was a radical intervention into a building type. Some of those experiments worked, some didn’t. To make the argument that they’re co-opted implies that the counterculture can never replicate itself or transform itself: it has to remained locked in a single, historical moment of resistance. But the strategies of resistance have to be able to change. I see resistance in later projects, as well, like in Sim’s book <i>Toilet Papers: Recycling Waste and Conserving Water</i>. It’s very interesting, and has certain parallels with French critical theory. Do you know the book titled <i>History of Shit</i>?
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<b>Interviewer: No.</b>
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Castillo: That was a book by a French philosopher of the early 1970s, Dominique Laporte: it’s been translated by Rodolphe el-Khoury, who’s now the dean of the University of Miami School of Architecture. Both books explore an area that’s off limits for cultural discourse. In France, it’s approached by a philosophical radical through a very convoluted discourse. It’s a textual performance piece about the relationship of waste management and emergence of modern cities, nation-states, and individual identities. In <i>Toilet Papers</i>, Sim’s basically saying, “You know what? Shit is, shit happens, and our response to it has been, ‘Let’s make it disappear. Let’s make it disappear visually, physically, and especially culturally and mentally.’” Sim is looking for an alternative to the technological absurdity of a complex system that uses water as a resource to flush waste away and then separates the waste back out so that water can be returned to the environment.
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In one of Sim’s courses, I think it’s the energy course, we have a paper written by a student which is the autobiography of a turd—the story of a turd emerging into the world, immediately being shunted through a labyrinthine set of conduits, through a building, under streets, to end up in the Bay or a sewage treatment plant. In a way, it’s impossibly vulgar, even now really crazy to think this was an undergraduate research paper, but fundamentally it’s radical for students to be thinking about ecologically vital things that are supposed to be so off limits that we can’t even discuss them.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Syllabus<br />
courtesy: Jim Campe</td></tr>
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<b>Interviewer: I see a split along Marxist lines between these two activities. That is, I think that the production of graphics to stop the war was more about challenging the sociopolitical/economic dominant culture. But the work of some of these teachers and students here might have been influenced by the radicalism but is not challenging the basic economic order.</b>
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Castillo: I would disagree with that. First, I wouldn’t want to mix too much Marxism in it, because I think that these students may have had some ideas about communality that were wonderful, but also quite utopian and abstract. They really weren’t Marxists. And while they were not in it for profit-making, they did sell things at a profit that they poured into other projects. Yet many of these projects involve enormous resistance to the idea of a consumer culture. The recycling of everything, the idea that you would scrounge through trash and take it to children as a resource to teach them things, was an affront, in a way, to what middle-class America would consider good parenting: you don’t bring stuff from the trash to your children to play with or learn from.
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There is an argument to be made that their idea of alternative building was quite naïve, the idea that cities are becoming impossible, so let’s move to the countryside, let’s live off the grid. They’re using Buckminster Fuller’s systems idea to understand the world as a totality, as a system in which everything’s plugged into everything else. But there’s a part of them that believes in a place outside of that system; when we move to the countryside and start growing our vegetables and using recycled things, we won’t be a part of the system.
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Clearly there’s a logical inconsistency in that. But I would give them a break. One walks away from the city in order to have space to become somebody else. For some of these young people, it meant trying to invent a life that wasn’t confined by the strictures of “When you ‘grow up,’ you’ll have your own family, and you’ll live in your own suburban house.” They wanted to see if there was a place outside of that hand-me-down world.
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<b>Interviewer: So do you think there is the link between the antiwar movement and some of the early hippie enterprises? Do you think that the Free Speech Movement and the war resistance are part of that link, allowing everyone to rethink everything, to think, “It’s all up for grabs”?</b>
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Castillo: A lot of things are up for grabs at this time. And we can’t deny the role of psychedelics in that. It’s odd now, because we think of them as recreational drugs today. And it’s so hard to imagine a time when somebody would take LSD and experience an entire world, one they had never understood was a construct, suddenly being deconstructed. We all sort of accept that, you know, you’ll take some mind-altering substance and you’ll live a different reality for a little while. But at that point, mood- and mind-altering technologies were new and crude, and made the airtight totality of a world collapse for people.
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In looking back at the counterculture era, you can see drug use as utterly self-indulgent, just like you can create a narrative about antiwar resistance that makes it utterly self-serving. Campus antiwar resistance happened after Nixon installed a selective service system that worked by lottery, which essentially overrode all student deferments. So for the first time, students whose social privilege included being in college confronted the notion that next year they might find themselves in a jungle shooting it out with guerilla fighters. It’s not surprising that campuses didn’t blow up before that. It was the coming of the lottery system that generated the anguish and anger that’s expressed in the poster-making project.
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<b>Interviewer: Because now privileged, middle-class white boys are going to war.</b>
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Castillo: Of course American college students at that time tended not to be disadvantaged minorities. Even blue-collar working-class people were relatively underrepresented. It was really the privileged middle-class white men who suddenly realized that they weren’t immune to the risk of dying in a jungle.
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<b>Interviewer: Do you see a link to what’s happening now, this movement of architecture and social activism in organizations like Public Architecture, Mass Design, and even the Autodesk Foundation?</b>
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Castillo: I hope that, in looking at this particular historical moment, students in architecture school would read it as a potentially usable past and recognize that it isn’t a moment of hippie nonsense but an extremely productive, challenging, and interesting if frenetic activity. There are connections to our state of perpetual warfare and social inequity. I think that’s what gives this particular historical legacy its bite today.
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Of course, just as there should be questions about architecture students going “back to the land” to build communes, there are enormous problems today with the model of architectural students going into Haiti for a one-time intervention. These problems exist on many levels, on cultural levels, on the fetishistic notion of professional expertise. I find it especially disturbing when these paradigms of help for the global south get fed back into glossy journals as an exciting new exploration area for modes of architecture which look pretty damn cool, which some of them do, while purporting to address these problems. But these tensions are normal and have to be acknowledged. You could not have students from the United States go to Latin America or to Africa, or even rural Mississippi, and make those kinds of interventions and not ask questions about it. I think that’s a good thing. But it does have at least as many tensions embedded in it as any of the student work of the counterculture era does.
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<b>Interviewer: In an earlier document, you wrote about the Aspen Design Conference and the French critics challenging these activists from Cal.</b>
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Castillo: That’s not part of this show. But it’s very much a part of the larger project.
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<b>Interviewer: Could you expand on that?</b>
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Castillo: It’s another one of Sim Van Der Ryn’s creative uses of grant money. Some of his research funds end up being used to rent a bus to transport ecological activists—self described “eco-freaks”—to the Aspen Design Conference. It’s like Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters descending on the Aspen, a conference attended by designers who are empowered, entitled, and often part of the extremely provincial New York design world. They are flying to Aspen to talk about their glossy ideas, and suddenly there are people playing drums and doing ritualistic dances and psychodramas about environmental warfare in front of them. It was an intervention that was intended as a disruption, and it did cause people to wonder if the Aspen Design Conference had a future, whether it was time to disband it or not; whether it had lived out its purpose.
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Sim also funded travel for group of French <i>philosophes</i> to the same Aspen conference. And they had no time for the hippies, because their view of activism was largely Marxist. When Jean Baudrillard and Jean Aubert saw these eco-activists acting out as shamans, they feel it is utter nonsense. In a statement titled “The Environmental Witch-Hunt,” the so-called French Group attacked the idea of ecology that these hippies stood for, saying the whole idea of an ecological crisis is a lie, a form of “boy scout idealism” that creates a false sense of social interdependence between class antagonists. To the <i>philosophes</i>, the idea that the environment is at risk of collapse was a hoax intended to perpetuate the collusion of workers with the owners of the means of production. Any idea that ecology would be an issue worthy of being addressed was, for Baudrillard and Auber, a feel-good fantasy that would unite class elements that would otherwise be locked in mortal combat, making the eco-freaks who were “shouting apocalypse” nothing more than quislings dressed as medicine men.
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<b>Interviewer: Do you think the <i>philosophes</i> were right?</b>
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Castillo: I think theirs was the last gasp of a totalizing ideology that could exist as such in its own airtight world. A world on the verge of catastrophic climate change couldn’t register as a problem to the <i>philosophes</i> because it didn’t conform to the Marxist rule book of historical transformation through class struggle. It is an interesting moment that highlights the weaknesses of both camps because, if you see the film that was made of the eco-freaks at Aspen, the counterculture camp seems fixated on disruption rather than dialogue. Their intervention was a psychedelic variety of narcissistic psychodrama.
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<b>Interviewer: But who controls the corporations that have brought us to this moment of collapse? </b>
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Castillo: You mean because the oil companies’ profit model is predicated on the demolition of the planet?
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<b>Interviewer: Right. And they are able to keep electing politicians that support them. So is there some part of the Marxist argument that still holds up?</b>
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Castillo: But the part of it that is problematic, unless you’re going to buy into the notion of false consciousness, is the fact that it is working-class people, people who buy at Walmart to get it for cheap and get the next one even cheaper when it breaks, who are pouring in the money that bankrolls the destruction of the planet. In other words, when we offshore production to China, we are ensuring that we will buy products that have generated the maximum amount of pollutants into the air, that we all breathe. Production is offshored because a part of the savings in production cost comes from not having to account for how much air, land, and water gets polluted. That we like to buy cheap stuff and throw it away makes us accomplices to the ecological demolition derby, whether our collar is blue or white.
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<b>Interviewer: So you’re saying in a way that these design radicals were onto something key because they were posing a criticism of consumer culture, which has both the working and middle classes involved because they’re consuming?</b>
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Castillo: Absolutely.
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<b>Interviewer: So the standard Marxist argument falls apart because the middle and lower classes are complicit in consumerism.</b>
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Castillo: Ecological activists and radical recyclers, who were at the heart of the Bay Area design radicals of the late 1960s and early 1970s, posed the idea that a new evolution in consciousness would be one in which you understood the world as a closed system, that essentially any pollutants that you created, either in manufacturing something or with your body, would need to be accounted for, and you should take responsibility for it. That was the idea that percolated through architectural coursework and experiments by Sim Van der Ryn and Jim Campe. It started with their reuse of castoff materials to create new learning environments at Berkeley elementary schools, using a retooled mail van as a mobile lab with the motto “trash can do it.” It continues with the Outlaw Builders Studio, with its commitment to building a new community in both the social and physical senses through collective foraging and reuse of found materials. Scavenging as an art form was a regional specialty, by the way; it goes back to the Beat culture of the 1950s and the emergence of Bay Area assemblage as an art movement. Sim’s architectural contribution includes the Energy Pavilion, which was the initial step toward the later Integral Urban House experiment, where many of his ecological ideas came together.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaXzrNmqHbv45DKei8NNWohAU4sXAkrsXaqht_pnL2tOcK7SRQ-7i36cXaLzzrNYTDCIzfRRNiqdWHhgDTl6GUQ_QEqjmq33gWqZdURqRzgFoXehUmqPk7EV-VIfnJEeoQeKgygQA9G_jS/s1600/Outlaw+Builder.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaXzrNmqHbv45DKei8NNWohAU4sXAkrsXaqht_pnL2tOcK7SRQ-7i36cXaLzzrNYTDCIzfRRNiqdWHhgDTl6GUQ_QEqjmq33gWqZdURqRzgFoXehUmqPk7EV-VIfnJEeoQeKgygQA9G_jS/s320/Outlaw+Builder.jpg" width="218" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Outlaw Builder<br />
courtesy: Jim Campe</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQ1TjrPxkOVqsh6mufqXCOnH8SUdEa1GSYidwhYMmtgQ7ZPU7w35ii4f9zbyw3nh9C5KGn3zlWqSTP3DGH0r6D6hPiyhHzRqqSUaAJUwbQM9PEZKa_UzcemA8TaD1R0DrNIki258psnMO2/s1600/OutlawBldrs+communal+studio+bldg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="217" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQ1TjrPxkOVqsh6mufqXCOnH8SUdEa1GSYidwhYMmtgQ7ZPU7w35ii4f9zbyw3nh9C5KGn3zlWqSTP3DGH0r6D6hPiyhHzRqqSUaAJUwbQM9PEZKa_UzcemA8TaD1R0DrNIki258psnMO2/s320/OutlawBldrs+communal+studio+bldg.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Outlaw Builders Communal Studio Building<br />
courtesy: Jim Campe</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKhTXO_kMeHkbp0uXHo5yrSNfl_OaRcaCjMzFV9hWqGqrgBKcTjruj5FIcoqOkYgysV1ZaBR2jF_hiw_Eo82CYmLdT5WvfTLobGk_iOlvTR4eJalnWzXJf8Ox-VoxpkTIH43u-i-Q6dsNZ/s1600/OutlawBldrs+hanging+sleeploft.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKhTXO_kMeHkbp0uXHo5yrSNfl_OaRcaCjMzFV9hWqGqrgBKcTjruj5FIcoqOkYgysV1ZaBR2jF_hiw_Eo82CYmLdT5WvfTLobGk_iOlvTR4eJalnWzXJf8Ox-VoxpkTIH43u-i-Q6dsNZ/s320/OutlawBldrs+hanging+sleeploft.jpg" width="218" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">OutlawBldrs hanging sleeploft<br />
courtesy: Jim Campe</td></tr>
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Sim and organic gardeners Bill and Helga Olkowski and the crew at the Farallones Institute found a turn-of-the-century worker’s cottage for sale in West Berkeley in the mid-1970s. At the time, this was a pretty undesirable neighborhood, and houses were cheap—this was a sort of “trash can do it” approach to urban homesteading. And while the house was cheap, they were also looking at it from a different perspective. This part of Berkeley, along the waterfront freeway, has the town’s richest soil, because it’s where the alluvial wash flowed down from the hillsides.
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They rehabbed this cottage to create a self-reliant life support system—the Integral Urban House. Philosophically, it’s related to the counterculture’s romance with holism and systems design, a topic that Simon Sadler at Irvine has written about. The result was a demonstration house, staffed by volunteers and open to the public, where you could find out how to apply environmentalist principles to your own life. It was an educational tool designed for mass ecological transformation. They raised varieties of local freshwater fish in an experimental aquaculture pond in the front yard. The small backyard had fruit trees, chicken coops, rabbit hutches, beehives, and raised vegetable beds; they were fertilized with compost made from chicken manure, rabbit droppings, plant clippings, and kitchen waste. Greywater from sinks and drains went to water plants. The house also had a composting toilet from Sweden that wasn’t code-legal in the United States, so its wastes couldn’t be used in the garden. A solar heating panel supplied hot water. South-facing windows dropped sunlight on an indoor wall of water bottles as a heat sink. On sunny days, they used a solar oven to bake bread.
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Sim and the Farallones Institute got another popular book out of this project. The <i>Integral Urban House: Self Reliant Living in the City</i>, published by the Sierra Club, became a sort of bible for urban homesteaders. Of course, there are many tensions in the idea of an autonomous house. The claim was that even an apartment dweller could switch to self-reliant homemaking and participate in an ecological revolution while keeping their urban lifestyle intact. But how many people want to come home from work, change, and then go out to slaughter and gut a rabbit? The Integral Urban House worked as an ecological display until the early 1980s, at which time the neighborhood begins to gentrify. And lo and behold, the new neighbors did not appreciate the smells coming out of composting toilets and rabbit hutches next door. What really ended up killing this autonomous house experiment was the fact that it wasn’t really autonomous, that flies and smells leave your yard and go next door where somebody has just mortgaged themselves to the hilt to buy a fixer-upper in the next good neighborhood.
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<b>Interviewer: You’re part of a larger ecosystem wherever you are. So what’s next in terms of your research?</b>
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Castillo: The next step is a “Design Radicals” anthology that will assemble stories of many of these experiments to paint a broader portrait of the Bay Area as a hub of counterculture innovation. The scale and number of activities going on here exceeded those that could be found anywhere else in the world. When you start looking at some of the institutions that are hallmarks of the counterculture, for example, underground presses, the number was enormous in the Bay Area compared to New York. From the beginning of the poster renaissance of the 1960s through the present, the Bay Area has produced more independent political posters than anywhere else on earth, as Lincoln Cushing has pointed out. And our local counterculture legacy is attracting international research interest.
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For the Design Radicals anthology, a distinguished architectural historian from Paris, Caroline Maniaque-Benton, is looking at the way French visitors saw and reinterpreted Bay Area experiments. Lionel Devlieger, one of the co-curators of last year’s Oslo Architecture Triennale exploring the desire for sustainability, which included a number of Sim’s projects, will be writing about the Outlaw Building Studio for the anthology. From the University of Sydney, Lee Stickells will be putting the Integral Urban House experiment into its international context. This wasn’t cultural imperialism, where things are being sent out and transplanted exactly as they are in the United States. Very different versions of alternative culture were built based on local interests and conditions in different places.
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There are other forms of hippie globalization that the anthology will address. For example there is a piece by Padma Maitland, a South Asia Studies scholar at UC Berkeley, on the mandala as an icon of Bay Area graphic arts counterculture. Pat Morton from UC Riverside will be writing on J.B. Jackson’s impact on the architectural thought and practice of a number of alternative design talents. Marta Gutman from CCNY, who’s one of the foremost scholars of the childhood design environments, will be contributing a piece on Jim Campe and the Odyssey elementary school experiments and countercultural educational reform. And Anthony Raynsford, who’s giving a talk in the Design Radicals lecture series in November, is working up a chapter on Wurster Hall’s relationship to the making of People’s Park, an early and important example of guerilla gardening and the grassroots creation of public urban space. The Bay Area’s counterculture design legacy is a rich, rich topic, and we’ve only begun to scratch the surface.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9JWDGnxUFZaRdsWFLb_j6w5Qk2ydw-1QjZh5qBASUt796-a0nca3bFDGsxwkmfmsX6PAE69Q6giAu918tjISjbZO5j9Zv8lz0sQpjGuCb1cp1y5d_JNcUfxQB3p5S84hKCRLJzwozoOYj/s1600/Sim+VdR+w+EPav+bedded+veg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9JWDGnxUFZaRdsWFLb_j6w5Qk2ydw-1QjZh5qBASUt796-a0nca3bFDGsxwkmfmsX6PAE69Q6giAu918tjISjbZO5j9Zv8lz0sQpjGuCb1cp1y5d_JNcUfxQB3p5S84hKCRLJzwozoOYj/s320/Sim+VdR+w+EPav+bedded+veg.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sim Van der Ryn<br />
courtesy: Jim Campe</td></tr>
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<br />Kenneth Caldwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11877278524477312027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5314334776379149827.post-51263821146623479672014-12-04T07:09:00.000-08:002014-12-04T15:50:24.118-08:00Part One: The Design Radicals Exhibit<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Modern architecture has its roots in social change. On the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, which was an important catalyst for social change on campuses in the 1960s, it is worth documenting the intersection of design and radicalism that followed. This fall, an exhibit entitled “Design Radicals: Creativity and Protest at Wurster Hall” will be on view in the Wurster Hall library at the University of California, Berkeley. The show is curated by associate professor of architecture Greg Castillo and exhibition designer Kent Wilson. What follows is a two-part interview with Greg Castillo.
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<b>Interviewer: “Design Radicals” is both an exhibition and a series of events?</b>
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Greg Castillo: The show opens on October 16 with a talk by the scholar of political poster art and archival activist Lincoln Cushing, who maintains the Docs Populi website of graphic arts dedicated to social justice. While most of us know the outlines of the story of the Free Speech Movement, we are not so clear on the impact that it had on visual arts and design. Was there any crossover? How could that have informed people’s work in design? I started to investigate that. This is a first pass at some of those findings.
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<b>Interviewer: What’s in the show?</b>
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Castillo: A large part of the show is dedicated to posters that were made in Wurster Hall in 1970. At that time, Nixon’s Cambodian incursion, the Kent State shootings, and the shootings at Jackson State in Mississippi had started a campus conflagration felt across the United States. Administrators at U.C. Berkeley, and also within Wurster Hall, decided that they would allow students to use their time productively to create antiwar committees, to mobilize Berkeley neighborhoods in terms of antiwar activities, and to essentially turn the first floor of Wurster into something very much like a propaganda factory. Instead of Andy Warhol’s pop factory, this was Wurster Hall's political poster factory.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">CED posters of May 1970<br />
Anonymous</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">poster by Jay Belloli </td></tr>
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<b>Interviewer: What did they do? </b>
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Castillo: During that period, it's estimated that 50,000 posters were printed. Students sold the posters for a penny apiece. Or you could pay more to have a silkscreen image put on the back of a shirt, but you had to bring your own garment. And we know that on a good day, they were able to raise about $500, which adjusted for inflation would about $3,000 today. This was a broad-based, popular “graphic arts insurgency.”
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<b>Interviewer: It's not typical for student movements to keep such diligent books. Where did you find this information?</b>
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Castillo: The reason we know so much about the finances was that these activities, and especially the fact that the campus administrators sanctioned them, outraged Ronald Reagan, who was then California’s governor. Acting through the University of California Regents, he hired an accounting firm from San Francisco called Haskins & Sells—it’s still in existence under a different name. They did a very careful audit to see whether materials and equipment that were supplied by the State of California expressly for the purpose of educational use were being used to make protest materials. I think it’s pretty clear that, had the accounting firm found evidence of misuse or misappropriation of that material, there would have been a purge of student activists, and probably more to the point, a purge of faculty and administrative staff who had been their accomplices.
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We know from looking at the documents produced by Haskins & Sells that, in fact, there weren’t any grounds for the assertion of misuse of state funds. From their report, we found out that almost all of the paper for the posters came from the refuse bins in back of the campus computer center. This was an early example of recycling and radical repurposing of materials. Along with the Wurster Hall protest posters loaned by Lincoln Cushing, the Haskins & Sells report is on display in the exhibit.
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<b>Interviewer: What else does the project cover?</b>
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Castillo: The other part of the exhibition tracks the work of a pivotal figure in countercultural design pedagogy, at least here at U.C. Berkeley, and that’s Sim Van der Ryn. Before being appointed California’s first state architect under Jerry Brown, Sim sponsored a series of experimental studio courses. His collaborators called him "Scout" because he would chart a path, find a new thing, ride that wave, and pull people behind him. While his colleagues were doing the project, Sim would be off looking for the next big idea.
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<b>Interviewer: Where does this story begin?
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Castillo: The first big idea was an intervention in elementary school education here in Berkeley by a cohort of young professors and lecturers, some with young children. Sim’s main compatriot in this project was a young lecturer named Jim Campe, whose wife was an elementary school teacher. Together, they looked at what was happening in elementary school teaching and thought—now this is my interpretation—“We’ve made all of these breakthroughs; we’ve walked away from some of the stultifying aspects of mainstream culture. And then we’re going to put our children into schools, that inculcate mainstream thinking? How can we find an alternative that will yield a liberating pedagogy for children?” They found the conventional setup of children in ranks at desks facing a blackboard absolutely antiquated. Their alternative was to have children build things. They believed in craft and the notion that doing and making with your hands, doing things as collaborative activities, would develop important skills in children— manual, intellectual, and social skills.
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They had children assemble geodesic domes and cover them with army surplus parachutes to play and hide in. They built inflatable structures in classrooms and had kids running in and out of them, very much like an Ant Farm dream. They had kids build their own “carrels,” little two-story nooks where children could claim their own place in the classroom to cool out. They were creating an informal urbanism within the classroom with these favela-like self-built structures.
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<b>Interviewer: What followed that? There must be a bus involved! Geodesic domes and buses!</b>
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Castillo: Jim Campe spearheaded an initiative to buy an old U.S. mail services surplus van and rehabilitate it. They painted it up, called it the Eagle, and went around doing mobile interventions at local schools. They would have all of the stuff they needed, much of it acquired for free from castoff materials. Their motto was “Trash can do it.” So they were very conscious of the notion that they were taking what a rich consumer society threw away as trash, reusing it with very low environmental impact. They were very early environmentalists—using it creatively to teach students how to do things.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Odyssey School Experiment<br />
Campe inflatable design<br />
photos courtesy: Jim Campe</td></tr>
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<b>Interviewer: Was there an anticapitalist thread here?</b>
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Castillo: One often thinks of the counterculture as being against capitalism and commodity exchange. But that’s actually the opposite of what happened. So, for example, for this school initiative, the Odyssey School Initiative, they put together something that they called the <i>Farallones Scrapbook</i>. It was a document of their classroom modifications and a do-it-yourself guide to primary school reform. The <i>Farallones Scrapbook</i> was initially printed up in a small number and sold as more or less an underground publication. It was part of a general trend in local counterculture reexamining child education. There was also a journal called Big Rock Candy Mountain, which was modeled on the <i>Whole Earth Catalog</i> and published here in Berkeley; it also looked at ways of teaching children that were not so stultifying.
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The Farallones Scrapbook sold out very quickly and was picked up by Random House as a West Coast lifestyle publication and sold tens of thousands of copies. That turned into a successful commercial venture. This Bay Area circle of counterculture folks were like venture capitalists, taking that money and putting it into the next initiative.
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<b>Interviewer: Tell me about Sim’s teaching initiatives.</b>
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Castillo: Sim and Campe created an architectural studio course called “Making a Place in the Country,” also known as the “Outlaw Builders Studio.” Sim was one of the very first people, as an architecture instructor, to reject the traditional preponderance of male architecture students. One of the guidelines for selection was achieving a 50-50 mix of women and men: something that was not easy to do in 1972. The students who were selected would have to agree to leave campus for three full days every week. They would go up to a remote forested area in Inverness, in Marin County. First they would learn how to forage for food in the forest and dig up mussels at Point Reyes, for example. They would then proceed to plan and build their own communal settlement, with sleeping shelters, a drafting studio, a mess hall, an outdoor oven, composting toilets, and a chicken coop.
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<b>Interviewer: Was this a utopian escape?</b>
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Castillo: At this moment in time for the counterculture, people were trying to figure out whether they should stay in cities or move back onto the land. You have to remember that this was after the confrontation at People’s Park, when Alameda County Sheriff’s deputies fired shotguns at protesters, sending dozens to the hospital and killing a bystander; this was after the National Guard sprayed tear gas indiscriminately over the campus using the same kind of helicopters deployed in Vietnam. Sim’s studio was geared to provide students with a set of skills that they would need if they decided to go out in the country and start new communities. Construction materials included old virgin redwood chicken coops from Petaluma that were being removed.
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<b>Interviewer: What about the criticism that these kids were just building Sim Van der Ryn’s country house?</b>
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Castillo: I think that came mostly from other faculty members. In fact, Sim has a house there, but they didn’t build it. They built what are today a collection of outbuildings. Some of them have had to be pulled down because they were not built according to any code: that was one of the notions of the “Outlaw Builder.” This studio was an exercise in teaching building and social skills. People were put in a difficult situation, having to just eke it out on a plot of land, and had to learn how to live together as a community. That was an important point. Students had to keep journals for this course, and one of the students said that she was learning to build both a place on the land and a home for her spirit. There were a lot of levels of meaning to what was going on.
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<b>Interviewer: And was there a monograph?</b>
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Castillo: Like the previous project, this project yielded a report that was called <i>Outlaw Builder News</i>, sold on Telegraph Avenue as a $0.75 underground journal. They were able to sell as many as they could print. And that provided money for a final project that we look at in this exhibition: an experimental structure called the Energy Pavilion that came out of a studio called Natural Energy Systems.
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<b>Interviewer: What year is this?</b>
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Castillo: 1972-1973. The students were trying to understand and put into practice ecological and solar architecture. Incredibly enough, from our perspective now, there were so few articles and journals on that topic that the first quarter of the course was dedicated to simply finding enough materials to put together a course reader. Again, there was a financial payoff. The course reader was picked up by Random House, titled <i>Natural Energy Systems</i>, and became one of the very first mainstream handbooks on solar architecture.
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Students started by trying to formulate an alternative to what they called a “techno-fantasy house,” an alternative to a house that sucked up water and external energy sources and generated wastes that just disappeared down sewage lines, never to be thought about again. They were trying to figure out the internal infrastructure for an autonomous house. And they built that autonomous house service core as another outlaw building in front of Wurster Hall in the spring of 1973. That structure was called the Energy Pavilion. Students manufactured very early solar panels, hot water solar panels, right here in the Wurster Hall shop. They manufactured parabolic solar reflectors and rainwater collection devices; they had a little wind-driven generator that generated electricity. When the wind wasn’t blowing, they had a bicycle device which would either power a generator or, believe it or not, a grain-grinding mill.
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<b>Interviewer: Like on <i>Gilligan’s Island</i>?</b>
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Castillo: Exactly. They created a closed-loop system for food production with beds of snow peas and lettuce which, according to their proposal, would be fertilized by a composting toilet. I’m told by Sim that this thing was picked up as a curiosity by a local television station, and within days they had lines of people wanting to visit it. It also attracted unwanted attention from the Campus Aesthetics Committee, which did not like the idea of “outlaw building,” especially on campus. So they told Sim, “Okay, great, you’ve done it. That thing has to be torn down before commencement exercises. We don’t want to expose these poor students’ parents, who are coming from all over, to this bizarre-looking object with a composting toilet in front of one of the buildings.” Sim was disconsolate, but the Energy Pavilion came down.
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<b>Interviewer: He was incredibly prescient.</b>
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Castillo: The interesting thing is that that it happened in June 1973. That October, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries decided to punish the West’s support for wars in Israel by creating an artificial spike in oil prices. The result was the world’s first energy crisis, the incredible spectacle of cars waiting hours in line trying to get gasoline, the speed limit going down to 55 miles an hour to conserve energy. These are conditions of a world that Sim and his students were predicting, or showing a solution for. That world came into being just a few months after they built their weird-looking experiment in natural energy systems. But by then the Energy Pavilion was gone.
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I should mention that the Energy Pavilion was also built primarily out of recycled materials, in this case a redwood barn in Hayward that was too close to train tracks and which Union Pacific Railroad wanted removed. Again, Sim volunteered students to demolish it for parts. Can you imagine university lawyers allowing the students to do any of that stuff today?
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Energy Pavillion<br />
courtesy: Sim Van der Ryn</td></tr>
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Kenneth Caldwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11877278524477312027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5314334776379149827.post-18948429381995811522014-11-05T16:29:00.000-08:002014-11-06T09:19:13.714-08:00Slowing Alcatraz Down<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Alcatraz is full of myths. Some true, some false. The park service has done a good job of underplaying the dramatic potential and introducing some interpretation, but not too much. Even so, the voices of birds on the ferry’s loudspeakers, the audio phones, the introductory materials, and the large crowds make it difficult to experience this solemn place as more than a quick trip between Fisherman’s Wharf and the highbrow shopping emporium at the Ferry Building. Is it possible to slow this experience down?
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Ai Weiwei’s show “@Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz” is probably not going to mean a great deal to first-time visitors looking for Al Capone’s cell, the hospital room where Birdman of Alcatraz stayed, or the answer to how a trio of prisoners escaped through the ventilation system. But for return visitors, Ai Weiwei’s installation offers a chance to interact with several different kinds of spaces and experience a deeper insight into the meaning of freedom.
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The New Industries Building has not been open to the public previously. This factory structure offers vistas of the bay and the Golden Gate, which the prison blocks do not. Prisoners had only endless days in tiny cells, so factory work offered variety to an otherwise monotonous routine. Above the prisoners was a gun gallery with armed guards ready to shoot if a whistle’s shrill was heard from the factory floor. In this spare building, the artist has created three large-scale but very different works.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>With Wind, 2014</i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">photos: Kenneth Caldwell</span></i></td></tr>
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<i>With Wind</i> is the first piece after the beautiful uphill walk from the ferry dock. Wind, a force that cools you in the heat, also makes a kite soar in the sky. The beautifully detailed dragon is not frightening, nor is it alive—like any prisoner, it is waiting for an unseen force. A viewer can look at the beautifully detailed structure and painting, but I found myself concentrating on the sharp contrast with the ugly peeling workplace where prisoners and their guards toiled, counting days to release of one kind or another. Another view of this cloth serpentine-like form can be seen from the upstairs gun gallery. This narrow space, barely wide enough for two to pass, was filled with sunlight on the day I visited but felt unbearably claustrophobic. I couldn’t focus on the work again until I left the building. It is no mistake that Ai Weiwei chose a dragon kite, a stereotypical Chinese icon, to begin his complex and enormous multimedia essay on freedom.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Trace</i>, 2014<br />
photos: Kenneth Caldwell</td></tr>
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In the next room, <i>Trace</i> portrays over 170 faces of political prisoners and exiles using plastic LEGO bricks. Foregrounding something as serious as the injustice of governments (democratic as well totalitarian) acting against their own citizens in the medium of children’s toys seems like an odd juxtaposition. Each pop portrait looks like a pixilated heat scan, not far from abstraction—perhaps inspired a little by Warhol silk screens or distant cameras? What remains is just a bright trace of the individual. At first, it’s tempting to look for the more famous names, the late Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Chelsea Manning, and of course, Edward Snowden. But like the LEGOs themselves, these are points of access. And then I was overwhelmed by the enormity of all these human beings suffering for advocating freedom and justice. Thankfully, the @Large website has biographies of each person so their memories are not left on the factory floor.
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<i>Refraction</i>, 2014</div>
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photo: Jan Stürmann</div>
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Interestingly, the most physically beautiful and complex piece in the installation, <i>Refraction</i>, can only be seen from a distance in the lower gun gallery. After being immersed in viewing the kite and walking around (although not on) the LEGO tiles, seeing this sculpture—wings made of metal panels from Tibetan solar cookers—serves as a reminder that art, like freedom itself, is not guaranteed. You can barely experience the most beautiful form in the island, a wing too heavy for flight. Freedom is never certain.
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After the claustrophobia of the gun galleries, being outside with vistas of the bay—which prisoners rarely saw—is restorative. A further walk leads up to the door of the main cellblock, where you enter as prisoners did and are faced immediately with the same series of completely open showers that they saw. The associations with the final solution, though not intentional, are obvious.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbFwJQPHJQBVc8IL_l3NkkRTDUwL6iX08gbzPnvLg90WDwl_5rgrFTsZx7VyIixmYHfbeZghyjK8FEQxdYfCVrl5c2_pa0RaCEBF4VZ9XV6Uy7ZS5mZnyFvU4Qq7BBVoQNg2yzepZ_aLQw/s1600/ai-blossom-detail-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbFwJQPHJQBVc8IL_l3NkkRTDUwL6iX08gbzPnvLg90WDwl_5rgrFTsZx7VyIixmYHfbeZghyjK8FEQxdYfCVrl5c2_pa0RaCEBF4VZ9XV6Uy7ZS5mZnyFvU4Qq7BBVoQNg2yzepZ_aLQw/s1600/ai-blossom-detail-1.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Blossom</i>, 2014<br />
photo: Jan Stürmann</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7i0rxnptak8RCyLh-lfmwiM9YoNVmzUSiPhnZiHpKet5hNBXv3PHNvFVxYSa2Kr4A7gswhTAkXW2AyOpqf4ddWZRBH_UpGsGZAbFR2CI7CJdANxIyaC4vQSD5bFR6DbpHiouPdCU8zbJ6/s1600/blossom-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7i0rxnptak8RCyLh-lfmwiM9YoNVmzUSiPhnZiHpKet5hNBXv3PHNvFVxYSa2Kr4A7gswhTAkXW2AyOpqf4ddWZRBH_UpGsGZAbFR2CI7CJdANxIyaC4vQSD5bFR6DbpHiouPdCU8zbJ6/s1600/blossom-2.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">photo: Kenneth Caldwell</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_NUp6jfMSB3pAlgtv3hfUrDZeNvTzEzLi1MB96dMwTvobyW8vhmGvZMb-hwGsL6uI9BaTUv2wJITBniaDH2q0L9rWbtWLZrxEsA_KTY0g_oZTBWNW0V-7pNPRZwN9uULvCgYTu5zeQR1c/s1600/blossom-1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_NUp6jfMSB3pAlgtv3hfUrDZeNvTzEzLi1MB96dMwTvobyW8vhmGvZMb-hwGsL6uI9BaTUv2wJITBniaDH2q0L9rWbtWLZrxEsA_KTY0g_oZTBWNW0V-7pNPRZwN9uULvCgYTu5zeQR1c/s1600/blossom-1.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">photo: Kenneth Caldwell</td></tr>
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Up the stairs are the hospital and psychiatric observation rooms, which are usually closed to the public. In the sinks, tubs, and toilets of the hospital, the artist has inserted precisely measured groups of porcelain flowers. At a distance, they appear to be bunched-up paper, some kind of waste. On closer inspection, they reminded me of kitschy trinkets that tourists might find in Chinatown a few miles away. Weiwei entitled these groupings <i>Blossom</i>. The longer you look at them, the more they turn into groups of pure white blossoms, white like the porcelain containers they rest in. They are monochromatic, a commentary perhaps on a colorless life behind bars. Yet they are also a contrast to that life because they are so delicate, so fragile within the stolid vitrines of fluid waste inside an oppressive monolith. One color, many layers.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Ilumination</i>, 2014<br />
photos: Kenneth Caldwell</td></tr>
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Nearby, in the psychiatric observation rooms, I felt another sudden urge to get out as fast as possible. But I was drawn in by an almost hypnotic chanting of Tibetan monks and Hopi Indians. This piece, entitled <i>Illumination</i>, reinforces the well-known link from Chinese dissidents to Tibet. But few people are aware that Hopis were imprisoned on Alcatraz in the 19th century when they wouldn’t let their children attend U.S. government schools. I was also reminded of the Native American occupation of the island for nearly two years in the late 1960s/early 1970s.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0dAVaqO6ASwG03MqTuBpULOlZVkdEejaGHN6IXu-tgEE8J13IYSUc6mtsWEhVW0p6XR_UQqeHzeJ7g2_DrNAaFbpf2S8zGnFJjqiF_6W7-lNd9j5ex7b3maTkR76DN2k7disnhLY_bMUz/s1600/stay-tuned-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0dAVaqO6ASwG03MqTuBpULOlZVkdEejaGHN6IXu-tgEE8J13IYSUc6mtsWEhVW0p6XR_UQqeHzeJ7g2_DrNAaFbpf2S8zGnFJjqiF_6W7-lNd9j5ex7b3maTkR76DN2k7disnhLY_bMUz/s1600/stay-tuned-1.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Stay Tuned</i>, 2014<br />
photos: Kenneth Caldwell</td></tr>
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Back downstairs and over to A Block, which was not renovated when the military prison became a federal penitentiary. The cells were later used by prisoners for typing up their correspondence and for storage. Here, the artist has turned each cell on the ground level into a space commemorating a well-known political prisoner. <i>Stay Tuned</i> encourages the visitor to sit on a simple stool in the small cell and listen to some kind of text or song created by prisoners such as Russia’s Pussy Riot, Chilean poet and musician Victor Jara, Tibetan singer Lolo, and of course, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Their voices reach across oceans, years, and concrete walls. With so little “art,” this installation finally causes you to just sit and feel the tiny enclosure that is a prison cell.<br />
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<i>Yours Truly</i>, 2014</div>
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photo: Jan Stürmann</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">photo: Kenneth Caldwell</td></tr>
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Exhausted from the walking and contemplating, you end up in the former cafeteria wondering, what can one person do in the face of all this oppression? Instead of predictable organic snacks on beautifully made, locally sourced wood tables that you might expect in the Bay Area, there are pens for you to write a note on a pre-addressed postcard with images of the countries where today’s political prisoners are being held. <i>Yours Truly</i> is a tidy conclusion to the show, but it does serve to remind us that one person can make a difference and help free people. Each of our voices helped Ai Weiwei get released from prison so he could, with help from hundreds of people, make these pieces of art. We hope that one day he and the other prisoners will be able to physically stand with us. As Edward Snowden has shown us, preserving freedom takes a lot of thinking and a lot of action. But one person can make a difference.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiKMMGulCd28Ep4S7eA2imXPs-Fj7Ljzyz0qcBqdhWiNxedala_YAghH1-5SjEECfg2LOd5Lq0yXILkftyDHgYYG6kuvPT3FitY-WYgZXfv6YmIwLaMMMgWe56CeYdURhE3TgUztqtoPdX/s1600/last-2.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiKMMGulCd28Ep4S7eA2imXPs-Fj7Ljzyz0qcBqdhWiNxedala_YAghH1-5SjEECfg2LOd5Lq0yXILkftyDHgYYG6kuvPT3FitY-WYgZXfv6YmIwLaMMMgWe56CeYdURhE3TgUztqtoPdX/s1600/last-2.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></div>
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More information:<br />
<a href="http://www.for-site.org/project/ai-weiwei-alcatraz/">http://www.for-site.org/project/ai-weiwei-alcatraz/</a>
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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/arts/design/ai-weiwei-takes-his-work-to-a-prison.html?_r=0">http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/arts/design/ai-weiwei-takes-his-work-to-a-prison.html?_r=0 </a>Kenneth Caldwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11877278524477312027noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5314334776379149827.post-52976720433203010362014-08-22T14:03:00.000-07:002014-09-03T23:21:57.691-07:00Back to Work: Design Still Gives Me Hope<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkUB8MicqiFzQ5evwGoAyhzL6t3lNimOtPSFACUdaWrtlmcxqnUIU1OWOwsBhyBKM0XkU7M7IFrNMthGjEGWkRhKjw8MuzeVXwtTs-i1pjxyoRuSEbpYGmYEl8gc9Gz0SpGU2Fovk5cH28/s1600/02-Pioneer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkUB8MicqiFzQ5evwGoAyhzL6t3lNimOtPSFACUdaWrtlmcxqnUIU1OWOwsBhyBKM0XkU7M7IFrNMthGjEGWkRhKjw8MuzeVXwtTs-i1pjxyoRuSEbpYGmYEl8gc9Gz0SpGU2Fovk5cH28/s1600/02-Pioneer.jpg" height="268" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pioneer Place<br />
courtesy: sussmanprejza.com</td></tr>
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The return from our three-week holiday in France and the United Kingdom has been more disorienting than usual. First, we had to give up wine at lunch! Then we gave up wine on school nights. Being self-employed means I can’t travel without internet access at each hotel, house, or apartment we stay in. So we never really get away from the tumult.
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Before we left for Europe, the battle for Gaza upset me tremendously. While it is pretty clear to me who is occupying whom, it still means civilian deaths on all sides. It’s hard to see a peaceful resolution, given the violence. Trying to make sense of the conflict practically requires a degree in Mideast history.
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We returned home to the tragic news about Bay Area resident Robin Williams, who was universally adored. It seems that everybody here has a story about meeting him, seeing him live, or working with him. Although his politics were always left, he volunteered to perform for U.S. troops overseas. It didn’t matter whether he agreed with the politics of a specific conflict, he empathized with the situation the soldiers found themselves in. They didn’t start the stupid wars; they need support. Of course, they need it when they get home, too, but that’s another story. It is strange how ubiquitous Williams was, and yet none of us knew him or the depth of his struggles. Let’s remember his lesson: compassion.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnX3PcBTIv3aT50yYQM0FICQSoQciJJzJ9JiLeJmeDqOpM53zzvOaIAdP2C-3-buyI9sTfPyC6Gf5ZQUyVSLeP0JFeVbmm0vlt2dV5IXUUtrNd_aL0nutto1tJ_o9hMqczDZC_GLz8Stzf/s1600/04_women-designers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnX3PcBTIv3aT50yYQM0FICQSoQciJJzJ9JiLeJmeDqOpM53zzvOaIAdP2C-3-buyI9sTfPyC6Gf5ZQUyVSLeP0JFeVbmm0vlt2dV5IXUUtrNd_aL0nutto1tJ_o9hMqczDZC_GLz8Stzf/s1600/04_women-designers.jpg" height="216" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Women Designers in the USA, 1900-2000<br />
courtesy: sussmanprejza.com</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPrQfRYGBWCauS5jaVcSQZsoBuYbANtM4Viqqkh-LTHZXnWYcxM5WREkiyWgBzS5xAUpGZhuiGd3mDnJ51YWmFuULKUrJ8EpVXOL7mFLqq65RaM9Rgn5Mw9tbLUoeS1l36zn2UfwLdXrbc/s1600/06_Gas.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPrQfRYGBWCauS5jaVcSQZsoBuYbANtM4Viqqkh-LTHZXnWYcxM5WREkiyWgBzS5xAUpGZhuiGd3mDnJ51YWmFuULKUrJ8EpVXOL7mFLqq65RaM9Rgn5Mw9tbLUoeS1l36zn2UfwLdXrbc/s1600/06_Gas.jpg" height="320" width="230" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Gas Company<br />
courtesy: sussmanprejza.com</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPlc5WwM_8xtu5OudPFFbefRe8BNYiRlXsb1NNZwsuQQ2OQGBih_MaAbejGDYMnbOw2kwVog-C6ZJj6WYkFg-Jc-ukuTBID-FvWJhZgPp-bsvogl0SVkF1g2hdnXEGZj__ELjfNbjgLU3O/s1600/02_MoAD.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPlc5WwM_8xtu5OudPFFbefRe8BNYiRlXsb1NNZwsuQQ2OQGBih_MaAbejGDYMnbOw2kwVog-C6ZJj6WYkFg-Jc-ukuTBID-FvWJhZgPp-bsvogl0SVkF1g2hdnXEGZj__ELjfNbjgLU3O/s1600/02_MoAD.jpg" height="319" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Museum of the African Diaspora<br />
courtesy: sussmanprejza.com</td></tr>
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The images from Ferguson are connected to the historic oppression of African American males by largely white male forces. This is old news to black folks, but maybe this time white folks will get it too. I remember years ago attending a reading at Black Oak Books with Walter Mosley. An audience member asked innocently, if naively, whether indeed the situation in America wasn’t better for African Americans than it used to be? And Mosely said something like, “No. Every night in America, a black man is beaten by a white police officer.” Not only has the systemic mistreatment of African Americans been pointed out, we are also seeing how our police have become militarized. Another outcome of the Military Industrial Security Corporate Complex that the Republicans built in the wake of 9/11. The enemy has been misidentified.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguDo-FMIFRNth0-WHFxAdNlFAxK11snjdrzrWcU3k7Itw6vhN3ya4kxmIt-yPbKrWELsscvoF7U-hFC0oA11_D1aihyGo6oCXPA_7MBXa9bHxp1zKdoRt7Q4okJuowRj5WgYG1E5PDZ4Ey/s1600/84-olympics-LA.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguDo-FMIFRNth0-WHFxAdNlFAxK11snjdrzrWcU3k7Itw6vhN3ya4kxmIt-yPbKrWELsscvoF7U-hFC0oA11_D1aihyGo6oCXPA_7MBXa9bHxp1zKdoRt7Q4okJuowRj5WgYG1E5PDZ4Ey/s1600/84-olympics-LA.jpg" height="211" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">1984 Los Angeles Olympics<br />
courtesy: sussmanprejza.com</td></tr>
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And then yesterday, in the design industry where many of my friends work, the death of Deborah Sussman, the noted graphic designer. She was 83, though that was hard to believe. She was a protégé of the Eameses and grew to become a brilliant designer in her own right. Her graphics for the Joseph Magnin stores illuminated my childhood and adolescence. What she could do with mall architecture! During the 1990s, she used to come to the ELS office to work on retail projects, and the whole place felt a surge when that little lady came up the stairs. Those spectacles! Her work for the 1984 Olympics not only branded the Olympics, but it also helped rebrand Los Angeles. Although her work was temporary and largely based on color, it had a permanent effect. Los Angeles became a leading global city after the Olympics. Amazing what a bit of colored paper can do. Looking at Sussman’s work cheers me up and helps me get back to work, which means sharing the work!
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgl1TZooLsaHdBTGHjJBJtc9bCEfVeu7nTmCG-OmOkDzG2_7YHdNXj0MR0CUjJuHCngTg3c09cgIdzb3PvCDqmechXHaui0lhFdRlQmyMHUdPC2R4MSse-eOeAZMC6viE40JsWr66CxE5lL/s1600/sussman.2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgl1TZooLsaHdBTGHjJBJtc9bCEfVeu7nTmCG-OmOkDzG2_7YHdNXj0MR0CUjJuHCngTg3c09cgIdzb3PvCDqmechXHaui0lhFdRlQmyMHUdPC2R4MSse-eOeAZMC6viE40JsWr66CxE5lL/s1600/sussman.2.jpg" height="320" width="219" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Deborah Sussman<br />
Photo by Laure Joliet for the <em>NY Times</em></td></tr>
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Other articles to look at:
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<a href="http://www.awalkerinla.com/2014/08/20/the-colorful-world-of-deborah-sussman/">http://www.awalkerinla.com/2014/08/20/the-colorful-world-of-deborah-sussman/</a><br />
<a href="http://designobserver.com/feature/la-loves-deborah-sussman/38169">http://designobserver.com/feature/la-loves-deborah-sussman/38169</a><br />
<a href="http://www.metropolismag.com/March-2014/She-Loves-LA/">http://www.metropolismag.com/March-2014/She-Loves-LA/</a>
Kenneth Caldwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11877278524477312027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5314334776379149827.post-23135860280335479012014-08-11T08:22:00.000-07:002014-09-15T11:48:03.547-07:00Postcard from Tucson<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8VdAmjBs1xFShyphenhyphenqROpz5T5XsY_4J6gx-jrFnCuooRf6QHlb78MNZmekLrsF2ndTrQyJ0_cZqVkNM49-b-pmnXUqiFCW7OMlLT2rhK6Rz_Kt6Q1XQ1wxIXtocbjTac6YuKP8_Pn3g_ZYD5/s1600/tuscon-1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8VdAmjBs1xFShyphenhyphenqROpz5T5XsY_4J6gx-jrFnCuooRf6QHlb78MNZmekLrsF2ndTrQyJ0_cZqVkNM49-b-pmnXUqiFCW7OMlLT2rhK6Rz_Kt6Q1XQ1wxIXtocbjTac6YuKP8_Pn3g_ZYD5/s1600/tuscon-1.JPG" height="300" width="400" /></a></div>
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Tucson remains the strangest of cities. Surrounded by the Sonoran Desert, majestic mountain ranges, pockets of charming neighborhoods, and the most hideous of American boulevards. On this trip, we were encouraged because downtown Tucson is buzzing. The Hotel Congress and the Rialto Theatre have long anchored one side of downtown. There was a good restaurant in the old train station and a few other decent eateries scattered around, but it didn’t seem to hold together.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2psVhk_9eAUxGPZFcqsjuXihYCejyeoPEhmDn_7QrLKQtErbvN2VMKttncWIMOh1g0oQE7CHTnNB7f_c0Jy1rvT3OykgSMVFDJH71d7A1dQ9gY8tTlGVdNgsQUl9LOl_0tMRiEfJmiTRK/s1600/IMG_3320.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2psVhk_9eAUxGPZFcqsjuXihYCejyeoPEhmDn_7QrLKQtErbvN2VMKttncWIMOh1g0oQE7CHTnNB7f_c0Jy1rvT3OykgSMVFDJH71d7A1dQ9gY8tTlGVdNgsQUl9LOl_0tMRiEfJmiTRK/s1600/IMG_3320.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hotel Congress from Connect coworking space</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimpOgXte5hiyFKUOfPZkw5cTNwG2gy9TVmS4qv6dN0HYJN_Ro4Oh6GLCd2NBNm0AFe0c1isnmIgx1NdpNfszB_5esY3lxo7V0k-fI_KTfPcz9lGGjkNlBuHdgrPfOladqtVj6A_LJcXDwa/s1600/hotel-congress.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimpOgXte5hiyFKUOfPZkw5cTNwG2gy9TVmS4qv6dN0HYJN_Ro4Oh6GLCd2NBNm0AFe0c1isnmIgx1NdpNfszB_5esY3lxo7V0k-fI_KTfPcz9lGGjkNlBuHdgrPfOladqtVj6A_LJcXDwa/s1600/hotel-congress.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Inside the Connect coworking space (CoConnect)<br />
in the Rialto Building (designed by FORSArchitecture)</td></tr>
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But now with the new housing complexes (which are rather bland) and several well-designed new restaurants (many created by our pals Miguel and Sonya at FORSarchitecture + interiors), there is a new vibrancy downtown. There was even a pop-up shop outside the FORS office. Folks are out at night despite it being summer and the University not being in session. A handsome large coworking space upstairs at the Rialto just opened. Rather like New York or San Francisco.
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While downtown, we stopped in at a party for the magazine <i>Edible Baja Arizona</i>, which comes out six times a year. The publication is beautifully produced and celebrates the emerging food culture near the border. It includes recipes, reviews, and interviews. Weirdly enough, it’s free. We found out about Whiskey Del Bac, which is being produced right in Tucson. Worth a sip! The new Sun Link streetcar will connect downtown to the university. Hopefully, this will mean fewer cars for students. If only the entire town had rail service. I know, one step at a time.
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The Arizona Inn remains largely unchanged. They no longer bring a glass of water when you sit down at the pool. That was a nice touch. We miss the free breakfast that used to happen in the summer too, but we still enjoy the free afternoon ice cream, although I wish they served it up a bit earlier than five o’clock.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Arizona Inn</td></tr>
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Shortly after we arrived, there was a monsoon, which cooled things down, brought up the humidity, and also brought out that beautiful desert creosote smell. My second cousin, Carolyn Burns, came to visit for a day with her new husband, Raed Haddad. Carolyn met him in Phoenix just after she signed up for a year of teaching in Egypt. Despite this obstacle, their relationship flourished, and they married when she returned to Arizona. Raed hails from Amman, Jordan, and it was fascinating to hear the stories about his homeland and family. For many years, Raed wanted to come to the United States because of educational and career opportunities, and the University of Arizona was one of the only universities here that responded to his inquiries. Although he is a well-paid engineer at Intel, he drove an Uber car for a few months because he wanted to understand the business model. We look forward to seeing them again when they venture out to California at Christmas.
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On July 4, we visited Miguel’s sister Anna and climbed up on the roof of her William Wilde–designed midcentury house. We watched the fireworks and, most interestingly, some kind of laser-light show on the Santa Catalina Mountains. A big family BBQ is the best way to celebrate Independence Day.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pool at Anna's house</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Celebrating the 4th</td></tr>
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We also drove up to Mount Lemmon, which we had never done before. The hoodoos on the drive were exceptional, as were the views. The town of Summerhaven, at the top, was destroyed by a fire in 2003, but the settlement that has been rebuilt is forgettable. Because of rain, we didn’t go for a hike.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3FrtPSg64tFu2Habmxbyte8kan6cpPX-M7Dmt21Y4ANKs5_hy-Ss19C72tUoX_bCmo6cYfMnhgKuZFTrzcOYdhCuwXHr-6pczZpwsRItADgs-wLQAKhkxitYDegPk2JJ92SEPTV8SfNtn/s1600/hodoos.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3FrtPSg64tFu2Habmxbyte8kan6cpPX-M7Dmt21Y4ANKs5_hy-Ss19C72tUoX_bCmo6cYfMnhgKuZFTrzcOYdhCuwXHr-6pczZpwsRItADgs-wLQAKhkxitYDegPk2JJ92SEPTV8SfNtn/s1600/hodoos.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hodoos on the road to Mount Lemmon</td></tr>
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The great discovery this trip was the work of architect Juan Wørner y Bas. He was one of the favored architects of local developers John and Helen Murphey. They found him when they stayed at his Continental Hilton in Mexico City. (Torn down in 1985 after the earthquake). His work in Tucson might be considered critical regionalism in that he combined modernist ideas with the local vernacular, or colonial vernacular. He loved introducing statues into the mix, sometimes atop his buildings! His annex to Josias Joesler’s quaint Broadway Village shopping center is an eclectic masterpiece. Butt-glazed windows, tiled arches, and ceramic statuettes atop the columns. What’s not to love? I just hope it doesn’t get renovated out of existence.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Broadway Village Plaza Annex<br />
by Juan Worner y Bas</td></tr>
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One of his best works is the fountain at the entrance to Catalina Foothills Estates No. 7, which reminds me of Barragán’s work. Apparently the water blew all over hell and gone and they turned it off. It feels like a modernist cactus marker. He also designed two condo developments near Campbell and Sunrise. One of them even has plaster longhorns decorating the wall next to the pool. Next to the pool is a koi pond, and in the distance, a view of the Catalinas. Might be a good spot to read books in my retirement.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiitLs4-5ZqdNR-yritXMUUy9fRWXrU3i48dgR6_JY7TTSnV0U_MWZqpqzeEqDzgklpz8gZwTtEzeolTtl0IYfXC4aT4xSaqzROLeQHPbM1fF_nKs2WAoTisOFtz5o_hxqWxc54tvMvkMCl/s1600/IMG_3342.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiitLs4-5ZqdNR-yritXMUUy9fRWXrU3i48dgR6_JY7TTSnV0U_MWZqpqzeEqDzgklpz8gZwTtEzeolTtl0IYfXC4aT4xSaqzROLeQHPbM1fF_nKs2WAoTisOFtz5o_hxqWxc54tvMvkMCl/s1600/IMG_3342.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Catalina Foothills Neighborhood entry fountain<br />
by Juan Worner y Bas</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1d84NOT_4O9c_LtIzgYsXFKfq4yBXaxrMVRATpFkVB_RgpHKFHoQpuqOwzE1vTlN4AvqRtPSsTbjbpM5xFBClsNg-d373zDtaQnMoGXm8zgzEx-Ijdz8NTNspDfRrlUBeKUxywAygKIk5/s1600/koi-pond-plaster-long-horns.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1d84NOT_4O9c_LtIzgYsXFKfq4yBXaxrMVRATpFkVB_RgpHKFHoQpuqOwzE1vTlN4AvqRtPSsTbjbpM5xFBClsNg-d373zDtaQnMoGXm8zgzEx-Ijdz8NTNspDfRrlUBeKUxywAygKIk5/s1600/koi-pond-plaster-long-horns.jpg" height="227" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Koi pond and plaster long horns <br />
at Juan Worner y Bas designed condo.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<a href="http://tucson.com/lifestyles/home-and-garden/joesler-successor-brought-unique-style-to-tucson-buildings/article_45290310-1b65-5fe3-b065-9e56804ff62d.html">tucson.com/lifestyles</a><br />
Bibliography:
<a href="https://preservetucson.org/architect/juan-w%C3%B8rner-y-bas">https://preservetucson.org/architect/juan-wørner-y-bas</a>
Kenneth Caldwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11877278524477312027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5314334776379149827.post-76309077481475620072014-07-28T08:51:00.000-07:002014-07-29T08:46:23.573-07:00Welcome to Frazierville: Part Two<b>Q: So much of your work is about distillation. And even though you’ve distilled it really far, there are multiple meanings to be found in the simplest of illustrations. Are they always intended, or are they sometimes a surprise because of your long history of doing this? Do you end up putting in layers even if you don’t know you are?</b>
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CF: I may very well do that. I never try to draw a picture of the exact thing.
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<b>Q: It’s an idea?</b>
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CF: It’s not necessarily an idea. I try to bring an idea to it. There are only a dozen or so repeating messages in corporate business anyway. My job is to symbolize a lot of those things, but leave enough room that everybody can see a little something in there. If it doesn’t communicate a central idea, then you’re getting into that fine art territory again.
But I have a job to communicate some central message. The fun is in a lot of those nuances. Why do I draw buckets so much? Why do I draw hoses? I don’t really know. It’s just that some of those articles are the most fundamental tools that everybody understands. We understand how a bucket works. It’s a vessel that holds something. It’s got a handle. If you turn it sideways, something comes out. It’s that simple. It’s a great device for storytelling.
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Occasionally, an art director will send me a sketch of something they want me to draw. They have usually studied my work so it looks something like what I might do. But because I didn’t go through the process of solving the problem, I can’t get behind doing the drawing. It’s not ego, it’s ownership of the story and why it’s the right answer to the problem. I have to go through that myself to evaluate whether it will be a good illustration or not. It’s not just a drawing problem. I get as much fun out of the sketching as I do finishing it. So much of my work is based on past work, it’s more than just using the same symbols. Clients have to understand that I want to bring them something they’ve never thought of. I tell them, “I live in this world. I’ve been drawing this for 20 years.”
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I’m looking for something that I’ve never seen before, that I really want to draw. It’s just like—a guy who wrote an article on me, he called it Frazierville.
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<b>Q: What are those binders over there?</b>
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CF: The wall of binders are sketches. They are supposed to be chronological. I return to them from time to time. There are different levels of sketches. There are the real rough ones, and then I ultimately tighten up. Sometimes a drawing will be presented a few times to different clients. It’ll get rejected, and I’ll recycle it.
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<b>Q: Just like an architect. What is that image?</b>
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CF: It never got it produced. No client ever accepted it. I finished it myself. I do a lot of second rights licensing; I’ll sell something after the fact.
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<b>Q: How did they find that? </b>
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CF: I have a website, but sometimes a client will come to me and say, “Do you have anything that you’ve done that fits this message? We don’t want to pay for you to do a new one. We want to buy second rights to an illustration.” I also have lots of original illustrations that have never been licensed.
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You just want to live in this world and try to improve it. And when I say “improve it,” for me it’s about finding essential elements and—“truths” isn’t quite the right word—but possibilities. It’s only until I’ve drawn something like, say, water a number of times that I get very familiar with it, and I get comfortable with it, and comfortable with rendering it a particular way.
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<b>Q: So sometimes you’re doing the practice without knowing the outcome, because you have faith in the process? The client didn’t go for it, but it’s a great idea, so you decide to take it to a level of completion so it advances what you’re doing in the world, even though you may never be paid.</b>
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CF: Exactly.
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<b>Q: It seems almost Buddhist. I wanted to talk about technology and the production of your work. You withdrew from graphic design about the time it became really automated.</b>
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CF: Yeah. We were finishing all the work on computers. Since then it’s only gotten easier. The problem today is everybody’s a graphic designer.
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<b>Q: But how do you physically make these illustrations? I see the first part—the first rough sketch—and then you refine it. Then what happens?</b>
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CF: Okay, I’m going to show you how primitive my methods are. I draw with a pen, and I draw with the same pen, and I have forever. Although I switched from a Pilot pen to a Micron about six years ago, and I love these Microns. And I draw really small. Part of that is because I can get a lot of things on a paper. I can draw very quickly.
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One of the things about solving problems, whether you’re a designer or an illustrator, is you have got to keep yourself from getting frustrated. The hardest part of our job is when we start to feel a sense of failing. When we’re in the process of solving the problem, you’re going, “This is not fucking working. I am shit. I am the worst designer in the world. Oh no, my career is over.”
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<b>Q: As in, “Are they going to take back the car, the house?</b>
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CF: You cannot let that happen. You have to work quickly and be able to abandon something that is shit and go on. You just to keep drawing and don’t judge it. Do that later. I’ll judge it in an hour. I’ll judge it tomorrow. I’m not going to judge it right now. Just keep drawing little ideas, because that morning-after test is always better than that moment. The name of the game is to invest as little as possible in ideas so it doesn’t hurt that bad when you toss them. But you’ve got to keep moving, which keeps you from stopping, and sitting there, and going, “Is this shit?”
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When I started in design at that first job in Palo Alto, my boss had this thing over his desk that said, “You can’t polish a horse turd.” I’ll never forget that. All the work you put into it is not really going to improve it if it’s just not a fundamentally good idea. I’m always looking for an idea that’s worth spending time on, and I’ve learned to see that with a doodle. I could tell you almost by describing it to you.
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Now, the other reason to work small is that compositionally I’ve resolved a lot of the issues already. I’ve already built in scale. As you start to draw something big, it’s hard for you to see all those relationships that well. So that starts to also define a vocabulary. Because it’s so small, I’m not going to put many details in it. It’s not interesting to me. Next, I cut this the illustration out of Amberlith—a masking film used originally for silkscreening. Then I scan it. All I need is an orthochromatic form. Because I’m going to color it in the computer.
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<b>Q: Where do you still get Amberlith?</b>
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CF: It comes in a sheet. I just found the last roll of it in America.
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<b>Q: What are you going to do when this material runs out?</b>
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CF: I’ll retire. The last roll I got is 30 feet, so I’ve got plenty—I’m good.
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<b>Q: You use old and new technologies.</b>
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CF: People think I build these illustrations in Adobe Illustrator. I do sometimes, usually not.
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<b>Q: God, you must be mad.</b>
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CF: What happens is it creates its own vocabulary. I want you to look at it and go, “This was made by hand.” I want happy accidents. I’m interested in that little bit of character that takes place. The other element to this is that it forces me to edit my level of detail. These characters don’t have eyes because they’re too friggin’ small to draw! I don’t want you to care about him that much.
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<b>Q: Technology has also changed who you do work for. There are fewer print publications. I hear it’s stabilized somewhat, but it certainly has been on a downward trajectory. There are probably fewer annual reports. How has that affected you?</b>
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CF: It used to be when we’d write a contract, it would be for print, and they’d say, “And maybe some additional web usage.” It’s the other way around now. It’s web usage, and maybe a little print.
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<b>Q: Do clients hire you for digital projects?</b>
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CF: Yes. Ultimately everything will be on a digital platform.
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<b>Q: Are there days when there isn’t an assignment and there are ideas that you want to explore?</b>
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CF: Of course, that’s the only way to bear those times.
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<b>Q: Are you being pulled towards noncommissioned work?</b>
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CF: I am being pulled towards trying to create projects for myself. You’re going to back me into this artist thing, I know.
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<b>Q: I usually end where I start.</b>
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CF: Part of it is trying to invent some things that I can sell. I don’t want to change my style. But I do have some more ideas, and so I’m always trying things in my sketchbooks. I got called to jury duty, and I was doing these “opposite” silhouettes waiting for jury duty. As you know, I have this other venue—children’s books. That’s where I jump to when I’m not doing a commissioned assignment, because I always have a book that’s supposed to be getting done—or I’m developing.
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<b>Q: What have you worked on recently?</b>
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CF: I did a large design/illustration project for Goodwill, which involved designing their fleet of 50 trucks for the Bay Area. Did a logo for a fine knife maker named Wilburn Forge. I’m wrapping up a new kid’s book about these animals that are contagiously grumpy on the bus. Kind of like riding Muni I suppose, or any other bus in America. It’s full of good lessons for kids and parents and maybe a few laughs on the way.
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Oh, and I’m designing a book titled Sketchy that catalogs a lot of my sketches over the past 15 years that will parallel a show of sketches and process at the Savannah School of Art and Design this fall. It's a collaboration with Mohawk Fine Papers and Xerox. It's almost 200 pages and 30 different covers! I’m in the throes of finishing production on both due out in a few weeks. I better get back to work.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Goodwill</td></tr>
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For more information:<br />
<a href="http://craigfrazier.com/">http://craigfrazier.com/</a><br />
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<a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Craig-Frazier-Studio/413048848707075">https://www.facebook.com/pages/Craig-Frazier-Studio/413048848707075</a>
Kenneth Caldwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11877278524477312027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5314334776379149827.post-60943240930663677752014-07-21T08:52:00.000-07:002014-07-21T10:59:12.415-07:00Welcome to Frazierville: A Conversation with Illustrator and Author Craig Frazier<b>Craig Frazier: Part One</b>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: right;"><em>photo by Kirk Citron</em></td></tr>
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Craig Frazier is an illustrator. Most of his work is by commission. But when you look at his collected work, it feels like the oeuvre of an observant illustrator/writer/artist. You enter what a friend of his calls “Frazierville.” I met Craig at a benefit for Oxbow School and decided immediately that I wanted to find out more about his process. Although I interviewed him shortly thereafter, it took me a while to edit the transcript. But since his work is timeless, I hope the delay isn’t a bad thing. He has a new book coming out entitled “Sketchy.”
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<b>Q: I want to talk about this continuum from graphic design—which is generally perceived as a commercial craft—to something called illustration—which is sort of commercial—to art. I interviewed Maira Kalman recently, and she said that she does not call herself an artist. She calls herself an illustrator. In order to work, she needs an assignment.</b>
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Craig Frazier: I am not a fine artist; I’m in total agreement with Maira.
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<b>Q: But what are you doing up in your studio at Sea Ranch?</b>
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CF: I’m upstairs doing the same work I do in my Mill Valley studio (though under very serene conditions), and my wife is downstairs making copperplate etchings. Now, that’s not to say that she won’t let me down there to make prints, but it’s really her studio where she makes her art. I’m a complete novice at printmaking—she, on the other hand, knows what she is doing. I learned about printmaking four years ago up at Oxbow during their summer program. Suz had been doing it for four or five years previous to that.
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Copperplate etching is very humbling. I understand the beginning, middle, and end of all my illustration processes, but printmaking is a process that has a mind of its own—and also a beautiful mind if you want to get on board with it and let it take you somewhere. I’m not used to doing that. I’m used to being in charge. And copperplates don’t let you be in charge. The press is going to do what it’s got to do, and the paper’s going to do whatever it wants to do. You might rein that in a little bit, but you better be prepared to accept some errors and some turns in the road. It was in my fourth year that I finally started to surrender to it, and accept mistakes, and appreciate them, and say, “This is OK”—and quit drawing pictures like I do as an illustrator.
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The difference between a designer or an illustrator and a fine artist is that a designer or an illustrator has an assignment, and they are supposed to be communicating; they are supposed to be solving a problem for a client within a set of parameters and objectives. That is the job, and the job isn’t done until you’ve done that, and the measure of that job is how well or poorly it communicates.
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That’s measurable to some degree, whether you’re branding a company or you’re trying to illustrate an article. Fine artists have personal criteria. They do not have a client. In essence, there are no real assignments. They do whatever they want to do, which I think is a tougher assignment than working against a brief or illustrating a story.
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<b>Q: Because the whole world is possible?</b>
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CF: When do you know when you’re done? When do you know if you’ve done a good job? How do you know if you like it? With an assignment, I look at it and say, “Well, did I satisfy what I was supposed to do for a client? Did they accept it in the end? Did it go to print.” Job over, done.
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You don’t have to sell it later on. It doesn’t have to measure up to public opinion. The hard part of being a designer or an illustrator is getting the assignment. Doing it is just the work that you do. But once you’ve got an assignment, it’s pretty much assured you’re going to get paid. A fine artist does something with no assurance that they’re going to get paid. In terms of a job, that’s a brutal existence. Most of us who have grown up in the working class—we like to get paid for what we do.
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I’ve tried to stay clear of using “art” in terms of my definition of what I do. Maybe someday in the end of my life, when these things don’t matter and my income doesn’t matter, I can try to do that. But I think it’s going to be very hard to wring the designer out of me, which is going to make it really hard to be a fine artist, because I am assignment-oriented. The other thing is that I’m really oriented toward communicating. You can always tell an illustrator who has tried to leave that profession to become a fine artist, because you see pictures that look like something. They tend to be expressive.
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So in your continuum—the three stages of my career that you were asking about—we’ll go back to the design one. When I was in college, I was studying to be a graphic designer. What I knew about being a graphic designer was that it involved some kind of applied art. I’d drawn all my life, so I thought, maybe I could make a living here.
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<b>Q: Where did you go to school?</b>
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CF: I went to Chico State, not a fancy art school. I just went up there to go to college and didn’t know what I was going to study.
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<b>Q: Did you grow up in the Bay Area?</b>
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CF: I was living in Livermore at the time.
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<b>Q: So Chico looked good?</b>
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CF: Yeah, really good. Unlike my own kids, I chose a college that was pretty close to the town I was living in. I went 200 miles north because many of my friends went there.
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In my third year, my mom said, “Hey, have you heard about this thing, graphic design? You’re always drawing.” “No, never even heard of it.” “Well, that’s how logos get made. That’s how brochures are made.” So I took my first class and just fell in love with it. There was an assignment, and it was like something I was trying to fix. My dad was a mechanical engineer in the Air Force, and the one thing that he taught me was how to fix things. I worked on all my bikes, worked on all my cars, and I learned how to fix stuff. He was a designer and designed things he couldn’t really talk about—because he worked for the Department of Defense.
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He was always drawing on envelopes and figuring stuff out, and so I probably got a little bit of that genetically, and then it was also just training. It’s like, “Hey, if it’s broken, Craig, we’re not buying a new one. We’re gonna fix it.” If you’re Scottish, you fix, don’t replace!
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I declared a graphic design major, and in my second year in the program, I took my first illustration course.
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After taking a number of illustration classes, I thought, “I want to be an illustrator. That’s really what I want to do.” I left school with an illustration portfolio. The first two people who looked at my portfolio said, “You shouldn’t be an illustrator. You should be a designer. I said, “Okay.” So I went to Palo Alto. This is 1980. I landed a job right away and was really lucky. Silicon Valley was just starting.
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<b>Q: At a graphic design firm?</b>
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CF: Yes. I walked in, and the owner said, “We have a position.” They had just started the firm. “The reason I’m going to hire you is because you can draw.” Because in those days, long before we had computers and long before people were swiping stock photos and images, you always drew your prototype designs.
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So I became a graphic designer, and learned production, went through the mentoring program. Within two years, I started my own firm, in San Francisco.
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<b>Q: Did you have a client?</b>
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CF: It was a management consulting firm that launched us. That set us off, and we had an office on Union Square, right across from Neiman Marcus. I started getting work with an ad agency—Saatchi & Saatchi—started to be kind of a ghost designer for them. We eventually moved off to South of Market.
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By then Silicon Valley had burst open, and I was driving all the time to Palo Alto or farther to do work for tech companies. I also had the San Francisco Opera and San Francisco Ballet as clients. Then we also started doing a lot of work for Steelcase. That got me into the furniture business, and lead to doing work with Herman Miller and with Agnes Bourne.
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That was really great work. It was fun because it was design-oriented, and they were smart people. If I could go back to that, I probably would. That was a nice niche. Then we got a lot of technology work. We had this client, Trimble Navigation, which is still around. They were the founders of GPS technology, which was originally developed for the nautical industry. You could get a GPS unit for $3,000. Now it’s on your phone. [Laughter] We took that company public and helped popularize GPS technology.
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I was learning how to impact companies and be a part of their communication and help them grow. I was spending most of my time doing proposals, and I’d come back and I’d design at night—and I had four or five employees. But control freak that I am, I always designed everything. I would do sketches, thumbnails, turn them over to an assistant, and she would put it together. I would direct all the photo shoots, and the writing, and do all the selling. I experimented with getting people to help sell for me. It was tough, and that never worked out. They can’t do it. They didn’t care about the same things that I did.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Steelcase Ad</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Trimble Ad</td></tr>
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<b>Q: It’s got to be the professional. When I talk to architects, I’m always saying, “If you can’t do this, then it’s not gonna work.” Because it comes down to the architect connecting with the client.</b>
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CF: Yeah. You’ve got to convince somebody to trust you. Whether they understand what you’re doing or not, they’re going to have to trust you. I kept thinking, “How do I get out of this business? I can’t stand it.” We were doing great work, and had a good reputation, won AIGA Awards and all that stuff. My kids were little, and I’d just come home—I was so tired and cranky, because I was selling all the time. If you have any anxiety—and I do—you go into a meeting and you think, “God, this is going to go one of two ways. It’s going to go really good or it’s going to go really bad.” It never kind of went in between. It’s like, this could explode if the wrong person came in the room.
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I remember thinking, “How do I get out of this?” I told my wife, “I’d sure love to be an illustrator. I’d love to work in some little office overlooking a downtown somewhere.” What would that be like, being an illustrator, where you’re just drawing by yourself? You don’t have to do these meetings. You don’t have to put on a suit and tie. So I learned a little more about illustration and who illustrators were. I knew who Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast were, and I had hired a few illustrators.
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I was getting burned out in design. I thought, “I need something more personal here.” In those days, with graphic design, you were supposed to be stylistically neutral. You were not supposed to assert a point of view. You could have a point of view about the way you treated a page, but that company’s identity was their identity, not your identity, not your style.
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<b>Q: You weren’t really even interpreting it very much, were you?</b>
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CF: No. Of course, everybody ends up having their own kind of a thing. Some people are very ornate, and some people only use Helvetica, but you’re supposed to give a client a choice: “We can make things very Swiss, or we can use Garamond.” Those decisions are not just about type, but a company’s image. You owe that to them to try to decide where they land in that spectrum. I always felt like I couldn’t impose myself. Take someone like Michael Vanderbyl, who is a brilliant design stylist, in my opinion. He has marketed his style to companies—much like an illustrator does.
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<b>Q: You want it or you don’t.</b>
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CF: Exactly. I wasn’t that way as a designer. I look back, and I think I had a great career and did good work. But I didn’t feel that strongly about graphic design. I thought, “Well, how can I get out of this?” I wanted to relieve that stress. The other really important thing was I observed was that whenever we were going to do an annual report, we would hire a photographer, and he would get a lot of the money and the recognition.
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I thought, “I want that part of it,” because, in part, I had to sell him. He didn’t have to go to the meetings, I did. “I want to be in those shoes. I want to be sitting in my studio, making my stuff, and people are out there selling me.” So I said, “I’m going to take a swing at this.” And I started doing some drawings in my own projects.
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<b>Q: It was for annual reports?</b>
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CF: Yes. One was for the Energy Foundation in San Francisco. Another one was for Symantec. And another one was for Oracle. I didn’t tell them who was doing the illustrations.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Symantec</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Energy Foundation</td></tr>
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<b>Q: But you put forward the idea that you would do it with illustrations rather than photos?</b>
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CF: Exactly. Nobody in the west did that. I was testing the water to see if I could start to make some work. I wanted to eventually get out of the design part of the equation.
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So I made a little 16-page booklet of some of my illustrations. Some of it had been published, and some of it was unpublished. I sent out a thousand across the country to designers and to magazines. And the phone began to ring.
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<b>Q: Was it a self-published little book?</b>
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CF: It cost me $5,000. I got a large project in town for Pac Bell—one of the phone companies. I said, “This is working.” Then I got a cover for Time magazine. Then I got an Atlantic Monthly cover.
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So I decided to close the shop down. I felt it could work. It took nine months to make that full transition.
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I wrote a letter to my friends in the design community. I said, “Look, no midlife crisis, no divorce, no illness, just changing what I’m doing—no problems here, okay.” I said, “I will be illustrating quietly above Peet’s Coffee in Mill Valley.” It was an enormous relief, to make the change. I really wasn’t that worried about whether it was going to work. I told my wife, “I’m going to make less money.” And she was behind me, because apparently I was pretty cranky at that point! The pressure was clearly killing me.
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Just before I closed up shop, one of the first things I did was the Mill Valley Film Festival poster, which was a breakthrough for me. I was asked to do it. I thought, “Okay you’ve got to have a style, Craig, and you’ve got to get known for it.” That’s the name of the game in illustration. It’s all style.
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“I’m going to do this graphic thing,” I told myself, because that’s something I could do. I couldn’t paint—still don’t paint. I was learning how to communicate and how to get an idea inside of an illustration—a singular idea.
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I asked myself, “What’s the one notion going on here? How pared down can we get it?” For the Mill Valley Film Festival poster, for instance, I put strips of film over Adam and Eve’s privates. That’s the joke. That’s the whole thing. When I started to get a few of those projects under my belt, I started to understand myself—that that’s what was interesting to me—the tone of that joke, how loud, how quiet—and the timing of it. There is timing on paper, believe it or not.
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<b>Q: How many sketches do you show a client?</b>
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CF: I show them two or three.
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<b>Q: If the client is really sweet.</b>
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CF: As a designer, I thought much more absolutely about solutions than now. That was just naiveté. But I liberated myself from that by realizing, “Hey, there’s a bunch of ideas.” It doesn’t mean that you show everything, but what if you have two ideas? What if you have three? We all love the privilege of choice.
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But with options come conditions. “Here are the rules. I will give you three sketches for every illustration, but there’s no mixing or matching, and you have to pick one. The actual representation of things is not open for discussion. I’m not making the head bigger. I’m not putting eyes on it. You see what my work looks like, and that’s what it is.” I didn’t want clients directing the style I was trying to create—and they probably would if I asked them.
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I submit them the same way I do today. I scan them, but they are just black and white, no tone, no color, because the idea is there and they can see it. They can see how I color. There isn’t any discussion about color, because that’s highly subjective. They have to trust me. But for every three sketches I’d show them, I would do a dozen of my own.
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In Part Two, Craig talks more about his process.
Kenneth Caldwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11877278524477312027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5314334776379149827.post-84405066624632107982014-07-17T12:26:00.000-07:002014-07-23T08:24:47.069-07:00Postcard from Nassau<b>Paradise Lost</b>
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When you fly over Nassau, just before you land, you see the most spectacular water. Beautifully clear and a tempting assortment of blue and aqua colors. You only need to swim a short distance offshore in calm warm waters to see schools of fish just beneath the surface. Paradise awaits.
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The airport has been recently renovated and lines are short. But there is also the sticky residue of a long history of colonialism. All kinds of colonialism have taken place there, including Americans setting up a plantation economy. The Brits had the longest run. While it is an independent commonwealth, Queen Elizabeth is still its reigning monarch. It appears that the future colonialists may turn out to be Chinese.
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There are 700 islands that make up the Bahamas. But Nassau is where most Bahamians live and where most tourists visit. Although it is home to thousands of hotel rooms (concentrated in two areas) and hundreds of cruise ships, Nassau is not a place of great efficiency. Fairly soon after arriving, you realize everything is on “island time.” Online maps don’t work, and many buildings are in a state of decay. Humid weather and storms take their toll. Only the wealthy can afford constant maintenance.
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We stayed in a hotel that was most recently a Sheraton. It is now part of the Meliá chain. Nobody cared how long the check-in line was, and nobody was in any hurry to speed up the process. When the client (that word has little meaning there) next to me was hysterical about swapping a room, I thought the manager was going to slap her instead of trying to resolve the problem quietly out of earshot.
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Although there was a grand driveway for valet parking, it wasn’t used, and guests had to park their cars at some distance in a temporary lot, which required you to cross a vehicular path. Never mind the fact that the concrete walkways and the plaster around the pool were spalling. While the air conditioner in our room worked fine, there was no HVAC going in the glazed single-loaded corridor. And it was being repainted with all sorts of toxic paint and plaster dust on the carpet. The funniest moment was when my travel companion opened our room door and the housepainter fell in.<br />
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Nobody pours a full glass of wine, taxi drivers swindle you, and the tourists seem willing to endure it all for the pretty warm water and the modest room rates at the Meliá (compared to the Disneyesque fantasy island known as Atlantis). Atlantis is a monstrosity resort built by a South African and run by Starwood. If you lose a whole world, you can build it any way you want later.… The Atlantis is probably the largest employer of Bahamians in Nassau. Many people think it is the Bahamas, as they arrive at the airport and are shuttled to the resort and never leave. We did not venture there.
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Next door to our rundown former Sheraton was the latest transformation of this quiet island. The newly found/built paradise is called Baha Mar. While they will have a zillion rooms, lots of pools, golf courses, and casinos, they are not going to be quite as fantasy-based as Atlantis. One ingenious design touch at the Meliá was that the hotel frosted the glazing in our corridor so we couldn’t see the construction zone next door. Perhaps it will be a surprise when it opens.
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Apparently, the Chinese developers of Baha Mar have created a nature preserve across the street, and other public amenities. This is the reason there is a new road from the airport and a new airport. What is curious is that the construction site is almost entirely Chinese. The sign over the gate is in Chinese, and the construction workers are Chinese. My friend said that the developers said there were not enough trained workers in the Bahamas. No doubt the cost of labor might have something to do with it?
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We also heard that the target audience is the newly wealthy formerly Communist Chinese. Baha Mar absorbed an earlier Wyndham development that was also out of scale with the early low-rises on beautiful Cable Beach. When it opens later this year (if you believe the banners), a new kind of colonialism will set in with a new set of tourists. I am not sure I will return to witness it.
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I am happy to post signed comments. Anonymous comments will not be posted.Kenneth Caldwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11877278524477312027noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5314334776379149827.post-33061792859438736902014-05-01T07:41:00.002-07:002014-05-02T10:10:00.802-07:00Liam Everett <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Untitled (Cahors)<br />
26"x21"</td></tr>
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It was hard to stay ahead of artist Liam Everett in our recent conversation at Paulson Bott Press where he was making a series of new intaglio prints. He reached whatever point I wanted to make long before I did. During our extended conversation, he was reluctant to make any conscious link to Buddhism, yet his work is all about practice, about showing up and being present for whatever may or may not come.
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<b>Q: What motivates your work?</b>
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<b>Liam Everett:</b> I think it’s dangerous to make art out of a blind movement towards making things—out of the need to make things manifest into form, make something beautiful. I don’t have that. For me, the doing is really the key for me. Not what gets done, but the doing. But it’s very hard to create the optimal place and state to make that rise up. It’s like a dinner party. You just never know if it will click. And to make that happen in the studio on a regular basis is excruciating. The times I pat myself on the back are the times when I’ve got the right ingredients, I’ve got the right ambiance, I’ve had a good night’s sleep, it’s a sunny day, and I get out in order to breathe. It’s totally evasive. And it’s a responsibility I find to have. It’s like watering your garden.
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<b>Q: Do you throw out a lot of work?</b>
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LE: Throwing out is the last resort. I’ll reuse things and reuse things. Sometimes things will start out as tools and then become the art object. And then vice-versa, sometimes I will start working on large paintings, and they become so problematic that I’ll put them down on the floor, and I’ll use them as a drop cloth, and I’ll start painting on top of them. And then sometimes, through a year or a months of being a drop cloth or a blotter, if you will—because I blot some of my paintings, just like prints, and they start absorbing all this residue from all this other work—all of a sudden they come back into the thicket and they are put back up on the wall!
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I try and set up mistakes that happen. I have to almost feel like my studio is booby-trapped. I’m building booby-traps for good mistakes, to collect things, whether they turn into a natural art object that goes out into the world or just a reservoir of research. It’s very rare I’ll throw a painting out. But it’s very common that I’ll rework it, or that it’ll get folded and go into a bucket of water and get put to the side and sit there for months. Some large paintings get cut down into these circles. Supports that I use to carry my inked and soaped paintings inside get used for sculptures. Sometimes the buckets themselves get used.
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And it’s not because I don’t like throwing things away. It’s not driven by a concept. What I think is interesting is when all the elements that create the reality of the studio are forced to incubate together. I think the denser it becomes, the more interesting it becomes. And when they leave, of course, the reality changes.
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<b>Q: Are you sometimes reluctant to let them out?</b>
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LE: No. I let things go easily, often as soon as I finish it.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Siguer<br />
26"x21"</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Untitled (Ahnur)<br />
26"x21"</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Untitled (Nuxibuxbaase Awadee)<br />
26"x21"</td></tr>
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<b>Q: How do you know a piece is done?</b>
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LE: As soon as it shows up as a foreign entity, that’s when I’m okay with letting it go—as soon as the dominant content of this object asserts itself. The paintings that almost seem to make themselves, I’m ready to let go of.
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<b>Q: So is it like a dance? In the middle of the dance, at some moment, you know it’s over?</b>
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LE: Yeah, as soon as it stops being familiar. That’s when I know, “Oh, I can let that go now.” It’s ready to be in the world by itself without my autobiographical thumbprint all over it, and I think that’s the challenge. How to erase the self-self from the painting or the print. Where is that threshold? I think it’s quite difficult to remove all the decision-making, all the contrived patterns, behaviors, habits that are riddled into my psyche, my genetic makeup. It’s not comfortable. If it was comfortable, I wouldn’t want to be here. I find it very disconcerting. When I’m here, I don’t sleep well, and I wake up early in the morning frustrated and freaked out.
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<b>Q: Because?</b>
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LE: The tradition of print making…. Oh, the studio etiquette, and this kind of scientific ambiance of it, I find very intimidating. Intimidating because I don’t want to let it dictate how the making occurs. So the stress for me is how can I push it and disrupt it enough, create a fission, get my foot in there and make something offbeat. It’s very difficult. My brain hurts.
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<b>Q: But you’re not afraid of that?</b>
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LE: No, because for me, this is all proof that I’m alive. I need that. If I fear something, it’s complacency.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLCvEZy13Xp9ASNyDPF5XWgZEmEQuagn4luNvDM7U8IhfE0An0cMlyklOLYvGY8Vguo4NPeZhdh7HbGFAeHoEb_wjlwrqZ_pcvhAioSNo-TmT0JWCsZuvbxRNuiP8fIp0FjdFSc15nGj7k/s1600/Rondo+I.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLCvEZy13Xp9ASNyDPF5XWgZEmEQuagn4luNvDM7U8IhfE0An0cMlyklOLYvGY8Vguo4NPeZhdh7HbGFAeHoEb_wjlwrqZ_pcvhAioSNo-TmT0JWCsZuvbxRNuiP8fIp0FjdFSc15nGj7k/s1600/Rondo+I.jpg" height="301" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rondo I<br />
14" diameter</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZdxFfvnpnDxrC4QQw-aC9HwZJIy271x8BU521u5IiJ2aHYoDpxtbNvkMLzkGPVAwhcSE5NTV5wfwCW7Ss9TbE5u3hQkbDdQunxVTmYjD6CgAN8ODqcKGKTbeIfl1RwTF-v1-4_qwgjSk8/s1600/Rondo+II.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZdxFfvnpnDxrC4QQw-aC9HwZJIy271x8BU521u5IiJ2aHYoDpxtbNvkMLzkGPVAwhcSE5NTV5wfwCW7Ss9TbE5u3hQkbDdQunxVTmYjD6CgAN8ODqcKGKTbeIfl1RwTF-v1-4_qwgjSk8/s1600/Rondo+II.jpg" height="289" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rondo II<br />
14" diameter</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh01B-_O5dOoiaEq97t2nLNIivGN-jmxw-TWdDQp-xuaWorZX61Am2umN7ctaq8HcAOqTOjkAWH9_6ssUtBoaXC-oWKzf1T8fpgouJ5P9-1iefwBEIbSO99wSNtSaS-Q4A0qIPxZFEY2Uo/s1600/Rondo+III.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh01B-_O5dOoiaEq97t2nLNIivGN-jmxw-TWdDQp-xuaWorZX61Am2umN7ctaq8HcAOqTOjkAWH9_6ssUtBoaXC-oWKzf1T8fpgouJ5P9-1iefwBEIbSO99wSNtSaS-Q4A0qIPxZFEY2Uo/s1600/Rondo+III.jpg" height="303" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rondo III<br />
14" diameter</td></tr>
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<b>Q: What about the relationship between this printing work and your painting? Do you care if the prints looks similar to your other work?</b>
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LE: We all wanted to stay somewhat similar. We wanted to see if we could create a link to what’s happening in my studio now. There are little ways we did that, by working with materials, folds, transparencies, and similar colors. I follow my action into work. One of the problems that often arises is that you can really move off in a different direction quite easily. I have a very 9-to-5, Monday-through-Friday studio practice. I have to create very clear restrictions for myself. I ask the printers, “Please don’t show me too many options, because I’ll take them all.” I’m an adventurer. And often you fall on your face, and it’s embarrassing, and you hurt. But it doesn’t matter. It’s not that I’m brave. It’s that I’m addicted to the adventure, so I’ll do it again and again. And that can be destructive. So I have to restrict myself.
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So that’s also why we stayed in tune with what’s happening on the paintings right now in the studio—to create a limitation, a context and cohesion. And it’s a crude limitation, but within that, we can do all sorts of variations and improvisations each time. It’s a system of support to get it funky.
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<b>Q: I was going to say because failure is also part of the process here.</b>
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LE: Oh yeah.
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<b>Q: Some artists come here and try something and just hate it.</b>
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LE: How many times I’ve heard, from painter friends, “I did a month-long painting residency, it was a total disaster.” I don’t refuse failure, because I fail all the time in the studio. If I fail, I just want to do it again. Maybe it’s a little masochism. Maybe failure is a primitive reminder, a proof, that I’m here, I’m a thinking, feeling, tasting, hearing entity.
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<b>Q: There’s a lot of movement in your work.</b>
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LE: Everything involves a lot of movement, a lot of sanding. In the paintings, most of the marks are made from reducing paint, so that means heavy sanding, power sanding, or I’ll take a painting and dunk it in salt water—I use these huge salt lick blocks, these ten-pound blocks. So I’m lifting, dunking, taking the paintings outside, hanging them from poles or fences that I fabricate, and then laying things on top. So it’s crazed, constantly physical. I’m willing to go to great lengths, great physical lengths, to find the opening. And that’s what happens once a piece is successful. There’s an opening, something reveals itself, and what’s revealed is foreign to me. Then I can learn something from it. Then I can let it go.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Untitled (Khonsu)<br />
26"x21"</td></tr>
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i>All images courtesy paulsonbottpress.com.</i></span></i>Kenneth Caldwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11877278524477312027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5314334776379149827.post-48950871093487085332014-04-04T09:25:00.000-07:002014-04-04T09:25:46.572-07:00A Few Random Notes on Prayer and Love<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Most of these blog posts have been about design or art, so it’s time for one that’s more about faith.
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In Los Angeles recently, we had a few folks over at our funky rented cottage for a BBQ (sans BBQ, but that’s the challenge of renting through VRBO), and an old friend of Paul’s drove up from Newport Beach. She has platinum blonde hair in an asymmetrical cut, high-heel platforms, beautifully painted toenails, and spray-on jeans. You might think LA actress or costume designer, but no, she’s an Episcopal priest! Another friend is writing a memoir about her rather bizarre upbringing in the shadow of Hollywood. The same day, I read my friend David’s blog post about facing his loathing of sports as a kid (often humiliating for gay boys) as he begins to coach his daughter’s little league. All of that got me thinking about parenting and parenting traditions that were intended, rejected, and then modified. And about faith.
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You can always find a lot about your parents’ parenting that didn’t work, but as I was trying to go to sleep in a strange house in Los Angeles, I started thinking about a tradition that didn’t seem to work for most of my life, but ended up becoming useful many decades later, in a much altered form. Our family ate dinner together almost every night, and we said grace before eating. The prayer went like this: “God is good. God is great. We thank him for our food and family. Amen.” My sister thinks she picked it up at a Sunday school she attended briefly.
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Often, we rushed through grace because we were hungry. We probably made fun of it. I know we interjected our own variations as we began to question God’s existence. Remembering this ritual caused me to think about how our parents tried to give us an awareness of faith, but without imposing any specific dogma. My mother grew up Lutheran, which was common for Norwegian immigrants and their offspring. Right out of Lake Wobegon (via the plains of Canada). My father grew up Methodist, but according to the family lore that he denied, they were originally Jewish on one side with a failed detour into Mormonism. My parents were not regular churchgoers. Indeed, they were married in my maternal grandparents’ home in Hubbard, Oregon. Nor were any of us kids baptized.
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When we were fairly young, we began attending different churches all over the East Bay. A friend of my father’s was instrumental in starting a church in Lafayette where we had to drink communion. We had no idea what that was about. The hymnals were always confusing to me, but I liked the music even though I couldn’t carry a tune. I think we attended mostly Protestant denominations. The most memorable church service was one I attended with my mother and her friend Mary Lee Saxton at Glide Memorial in 1972. It was literally days after Angela Davis had been released from prison on bail. Reverend Cecil Williams introduced her, and the crowd went wild. My mother took off her shoes and stood on her pew to see Davis and clap for her. Now, baby, that was church.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Courtesy nndb.com</td></tr>
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When I was a kid, many of my closest friends were Jewish and I started going to Jewish Youth Group meetings. Some of the houses where we met were quite grand, and the meetings were fun, but finally one of the mothers called my mother to ask her to join Hadassah, and that was their way of saying that I didn’t really belong.
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I always more interested in the buildings than any liturgy. Eventually we seemed to settle on the First Unitarian Church of Berkeley, a block up the hill from our house. A handsome concrete structure designed by Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons with a central atrium built on land donated by Bernard Maybeck. The church, with its sweeping view of the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge, was home to community theater and lots of benefits for Cesar Chavez’s farm workers and folks trying to stop the war in Vietnam. But we didn’t really go to church much. In fact, once, the minister called because he saw our name and address on the rolls but realized he had never even met us. I went to services as a young teenager because of the political sensibility. There were guests like Malvina Reynolds and Ron Dellums. Later on, that’s where my brother got married and where we held my mother’s memorial.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1cgSQta3peCXD5hYrpuARjz6Yn9MHzZ2pexfIrijU6TC1ve8Tv0oEOlCuTHWoVEsDFrXzmKqb7N8rF2MJ_XnrMYR_jPDFNpe184s4wgaBvwVwTvwhokM9pgd98aYHwimsaijIPk4y4HP6/s1600/first-unitarian.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1cgSQta3peCXD5hYrpuARjz6Yn9MHzZ2pexfIrijU6TC1ve8Tv0oEOlCuTHWoVEsDFrXzmKqb7N8rF2MJ_XnrMYR_jPDFNpe184s4wgaBvwVwTvwhokM9pgd98aYHwimsaijIPk4y4HP6/s1600/first-unitarian.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sketch of First Unitarian Church</td></tr>
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In the 1990s, I was drawn to the aesthetic of the Buddhists and tried two temples in Berkeley. I sat for a while at the Berkeley Zen Center, which is linked to the San Francisco Zen Center and the Soto Zen tradition that Suzuki Roshi brought to San Francisco and the west in 1959 when he was the age I am now. I went to BZC off and on for a while but never felt connected to the community of people. Occasionally, I visit Green Gulch and sit there on a Sunday. Because of the relatively large size of the gathering, I don’t look for community. I try hard to empty the mind, but it is still largely an aesthetic experience. For several years, I went to Tassajara each summer with my pal (from preschool!) Mara and her husband Chris. It was especially comforting in the summer of 1999 just after my mother passed away. Later I brought Paul, but he passed out in the hot mineral water, and we haven’t been back.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXY7ENEp2rao2ULS-dKtYqfXnDBu18wuyuoGRDRa8aAs7HMZGNtYeXkJEBjTuWMJmUUFtwsHOac5dTb7v1-YLj6qzDXHlU__vL1d9AhLwL93D7zNNQCrjgiqFL_3phLQEXPk6bZcI0pR06/s1600/Tassajara-Zen-Mountain-Center.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXY7ENEp2rao2ULS-dKtYqfXnDBu18wuyuoGRDRa8aAs7HMZGNtYeXkJEBjTuWMJmUUFtwsHOac5dTb7v1-YLj6qzDXHlU__vL1d9AhLwL93D7zNNQCrjgiqFL_3phLQEXPk6bZcI0pR06/s1600/Tassajara-Zen-Mountain-Center.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tassajara Zen Mountain Center</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNrL8rR-5lGspRbGBsHyHqtO5LxKvRHQx3t0dp5eAKtEVUbl439fYKB-K9dTRXVmyrzviy7RBxi3MwJOLuFmYUxxdrd5KESoJkdhlMiQY1KLOXaQZiS_bGJu3Flc8_mQTnt0R-w8OTb8lc/s1600/green-gulch-zen-center.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNrL8rR-5lGspRbGBsHyHqtO5LxKvRHQx3t0dp5eAKtEVUbl439fYKB-K9dTRXVmyrzviy7RBxi3MwJOLuFmYUxxdrd5KESoJkdhlMiQY1KLOXaQZiS_bGJu3Flc8_mQTnt0R-w8OTb8lc/s1600/green-gulch-zen-center.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Green Gulch Zen Center</td></tr>
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When I met Paul, he worked as the musician for the Sunday afternoon service at St. Mary the Virgin, a beautiful small Episcopal church out on Union Street. It was a strange group of folks, most of them quite wealthy, but truly charitable. Paul worked with two priests. The second one was quite open about being gay and a recovering alcoholic and gave a homily about the Bible being a lie. Now I liked her! But she wasn’t a big fan of Paul’s ideas about music.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwrqtfHtSWhVImwU2FRE7GXcFqDEkhd18ZTUbYvwWu4cNr_0S6pm7x9cdUACFhqZa0XY0v5kpgrC_78YuMFX_Nf4npR8z4lCFWVF79uHiDVKph7CMu8NjBhUfdpFmSxp9eOS9qI6QGRXXe/s1600/st.mary.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwrqtfHtSWhVImwU2FRE7GXcFqDEkhd18ZTUbYvwWu4cNr_0S6pm7x9cdUACFhqZa0XY0v5kpgrC_78YuMFX_Nf4npR8z4lCFWVF79uHiDVKph7CMu8NjBhUfdpFmSxp9eOS9qI6QGRXXe/s1600/st.mary.jpg" height="320" width="260" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="mousetype">St. Mary the Virgin Episcopal Church sanctuary</span><br />
<span class="mousetype">Courtesy Turnbull Griffin Haesloop Architects</span></td></tr>
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Several years ago, I had a dream about praying. And I realized praying was like pure art, something that begins only with you. It need not be about a religious figure telling you what to say or think. It is an empty space you fill up or leave empty. This was the lesson of Buddhism that I seemed to have missed when I was sitting. Find the empty place and try to stay there. Over time, my most common prayer was just saying, “Thank you.” And the place I find myself saying it is in the shower. The first thank you is for hot water, something most of us in middle class America take for granted. (One day in a hotel in lower Manhattan, there was no hot water, and instead of letting it go, I was grouchy all day. So even if you remember to be thankful, it doesn’t mean you don’t expect the comfort!) Each morning I also try to be thankful for having found a partnership that is caring, a home that is comfortable (if not quite large enough for the art and books we continue to acquire), friends, food, and not having to scrape to get by. Thankful for finding work that is meaningful and allows me to interact with design as well as with interesting people.
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I often forget to get through all that appreciation before it’s time to get out of the shower. So I start my prayer routine, if that’s what you call it, when I am doing my daily swim. But there, instead of being thankful for the miracle of abundant warm water, I try to empty my head out and just breathe in and out and move. The usual chatter fills my head, and I try again, remembering not to chastise myself for being so loud. Later, when I ride BART into the city, I try and remember to close my eyes and empty my head out again. I feel that the combination of these various ways of praying helps me be kinder and more open. Which brings me to a kind of answer to a prayer that I didn’t know I had.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSYcdsm1k68j5WIyW3eDG9f4x6LJ5OLU9gl0P4dDhR0owHsBWoiUuPS8d0zp10AQATrnwwgw4PtOWi3WbULAWOYGueD4YJ_g-4XvMfUTQ7Pib81DikhsigwOmXPWqtzSwrvMCvxbIPhN1W/s1600/park+bellevue+tower+pool.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSYcdsm1k68j5WIyW3eDG9f4x6LJ5OLU9gl0P4dDhR0owHsBWoiUuPS8d0zp10AQATrnwwgw4PtOWi3WbULAWOYGueD4YJ_g-4XvMfUTQ7Pib81DikhsigwOmXPWqtzSwrvMCvxbIPhN1W/s1600/park+bellevue+tower+pool.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Our pool</td></tr>
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Almost two years ago, my friends David Kerr and Jay Stowsky brought two young children, brother and sister, into their lives. They were in foster care at the time, and David and Jay became their foster parents as part of an adoption process. Last September, they formally adopted them.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiR5hegzA8g07GOX11Mmp2UmjEK5tjRozelbQhVVzJx1I93CBRSAmI30A8wsjtB93pY8WVhveWUx6Cj56zqNDyjXGFDIOZAH3zf9OSninu7cEwkxVfkmxU5a32aVLO4RATA5m2wG-IEJ5YO/s1600/100_1416.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiR5hegzA8g07GOX11Mmp2UmjEK5tjRozelbQhVVzJx1I93CBRSAmI30A8wsjtB93pY8WVhveWUx6Cj56zqNDyjXGFDIOZAH3zf9OSninu7cEwkxVfkmxU5a32aVLO4RATA5m2wG-IEJ5YO/s1600/100_1416.JPG" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Kerr Stowsky adoption</td></tr>
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I have been Uncle Kenny to two birth nieces and dozens of children of my friends over the years. (I just found out that two of my friend’s kids thought we were actually blood related!) Sometimes, I performed well, and other times, I was forgetful. But with these two young children, I feel more focused, more present, more open. Their needs are different because their early lives were so unstable and unsettling. I think because of “my practice,” my trying to slow down and be thankful, I am more open not only to giving love but also to hearing someone ask for love without precise language. The other day, we arrived for a quick visit at David and Jay’s, and young Jaden (we call him little Jay) was waiting on the patio because from that vantage point he could see us come up the steps to the back door or hear us open the front gate and walk up the path to the front door. He had us covered. His older sister Shayla (Jaden calls her ShayShay) was waiting inside with her book. When I first met her, she didn’t know how to read, and now she reads me entire books far beyond her grade level. When we were at the Exploratorium last weekend, Jaden focused intently on just a few of the gizmos, but Shayla was drawn to many of the bright new shiny objects. She has learned how to wait patiently for her turn, even though she worries that whatever she wants will be gone by the time she gets to the front of the line. After our science playtime, we were walking to get ice cream, and she complained bitterly about her feet hurting and that it isn’t fair that Jaden gets carried all the time. Shayla is too big (not to mention too old!) to get carried, but what she really needed was someone to hear her complaint and stay next to her. In a few minutes, we got our soft serve ice cream cones and watched the bay. There is still something so comforting about sitting outside on a beautiful day with a good ice cream cone. It washes away the sore feet and injustices of being a big sister.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyCM8eSMBaUW-WK_ileFoLWneDlLR4qR8XrhEtrWDP8SOiTGCcuQAyvo-u140WZScsdbQazEgBPGyPFAdUYssGmHH2PtAvZqyFs3mx-8dO4K0ZG8ZwLv-bar1PiKHX4vbFDiRTBny5UH5z/s1600/100_0858.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyCM8eSMBaUW-WK_ileFoLWneDlLR4qR8XrhEtrWDP8SOiTGCcuQAyvo-u140WZScsdbQazEgBPGyPFAdUYssGmHH2PtAvZqyFs3mx-8dO4K0ZG8ZwLv-bar1PiKHX4vbFDiRTBny5UH5z/s1600/100_0858.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jay with the kids at Point Lobos</td></tr>
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Watching the kids find their sea legs in a new home and with a new family has been the most powerful emotional experience of the last few years. I can’t close Guantanamo or stop the NSA or any of the many political issues I post articles about every week. But I can hold a trusting little hand during a walk and throw a laughing child up into the air and let them fall into the pool, and they know I will catch them before they go too far under. I really think my home-cooked form of prayer has helped give me the stillness and gratitude to be present with these wondrous kids. I am more open to love, which travels two ways all the time. That is an answered prayer.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgo-dNsj9HNwldkMjCboQb09UpQWh375ZMQ7fdPqDGtcY1R-CIUi39z8d7sSbHEIJUCClWgH3hxMlnCwiXTsN5QdleI9dxvs18pI28M3Pxl36ts3krlDHeXE4lV2D8A-noyHyMEY-_8vwlv/s1600/100_1793.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgo-dNsj9HNwldkMjCboQb09UpQWh375ZMQ7fdPqDGtcY1R-CIUi39z8d7sSbHEIJUCClWgH3hxMlnCwiXTsN5QdleI9dxvs18pI28M3Pxl36ts3krlDHeXE4lV2D8A-noyHyMEY-_8vwlv/s1600/100_1793.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Kerr Stowskys at Disneyland</td></tr>
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<br />Kenneth Caldwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11877278524477312027noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5314334776379149827.post-26305332752565943412014-02-14T09:02:00.000-08:002014-02-14T09:02:40.895-08:00Google Buses, 8 Washington, One Percent, and Resist!<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4KEa_sXQlmw1ArUwVkuGd_kbJfSFM2QaVWfYGcvtt1aPMXFNoLsaSp2BSOuAibRbCgTD1AvZYaJ_UYYbc9-Yvw6L0k7omL0w5-jVTrRbdDdFHMfzD1nVcbE3dUAdbsdtbKFCwGyeHkYRB/s1600/google.bus.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4KEa_sXQlmw1ArUwVkuGd_kbJfSFM2QaVWfYGcvtt1aPMXFNoLsaSp2BSOuAibRbCgTD1AvZYaJ_UYYbc9-Yvw6L0k7omL0w5-jVTrRbdDdFHMfzD1nVcbE3dUAdbsdtbKFCwGyeHkYRB/s1600/google.bus.JPG" height="213" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Courtesy Leslie Dreyer<br />
mercurynews.com</td></tr>
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This post started out as an exploration about recent changes and resistance in the bay area. But now I am finishing it on Valentine's Day. So, it must be about love too.<br />
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There has been a lot of talk about Google buses recently. Some demonstrators have held rallies at the bus stops, and in one extreme case, a demonstrator broke a window on a bus. The city of San Francisco has begun charging a small fee for the use of public bus stops. But this anger towards Google is real. Where is it coming from?
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I have been remembering the many Occupy camps I visited in 2011. Although those camps are gone, the idea that the one percent are running everything has stuck in the country’s consciousness. That is victory. A foundation was laid.
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San Francisco is changing and quickly becoming unaffordable for anybody who makes less than six digits. Some of the resistance to this change has to do with nostalgia, a form of NIMBYism. Some of it has to do with large buses crowding small streets. Some of it has to do with working people being evicted by developers buying small buildings to convert them to TICs (as a friend of ours recently experienced). Some of it probably has to do with envy too! And some of it has to do with Google becoming Big Brother and cozying up to the evil NSA. (“Do no evil” indeed.)
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At the same time, a project proposed on the Embarcadero, 8 Washington, was recently voted down at the ballot box. The idea of putting every possible development project up for the ballot is questionable, but there were people whom I respect on both sides of the argument. I am of at least two minds (typical). On the one hand, I am not crazy about another housing project for the one percent. But on the other hand, it is a higher use than a private swim and tennis club that benefits the affluent with little contribution to the city. I have to say, I rather liked SOM’s design too.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Courtesy 8washington.com</td></tr>
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But both of these events (and dozens of others, including the development proposals adjacent to Crissy Field) bring up issues about urban development and class warfare, or at least potential class warfare. Right now it’s class conflict. Organizations ranging from the big (SPUR) to the small (Storefront Lab) have been doing a good job talking about density, development, transit, and regional planning. But right now, I am thinking about class conflict turning into class warfare. The Google buses (which provide non-single-occupant-vehicle transportation for well-paid middle class workers, not members of the ruling class—remember, those are the ones with drivers and private jets!) are a symbol, as much as 8 Washington is a symbol. The one percent are taking over the city, much as they have already taken over the society. The difference is that in San Francisco, it has become more visible. At the national level, the elite of the one percent have done a good job of staying hidden.
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The underlying conflict here is the one discussed in Robert Reich’s recent writings and his documentary Inequality for All. His main point is that the growing inequality between the very rich and everybody else is destabilizing our democratic society. And he’s right.
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I think the choice is clear. We either move towards voluntary redistribution of wealth downwards or risk an involuntary redistribution of wealth accompanied by violence. It is in the long-term interest of the one percent to start reshaping society so that they don’t concentrate so much wealth in their camp. I mean, honestly, how much better can one’s life be after the first few million?
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHnu3vo5Cex2COtEMwjn0xjHXJsHFAOahJckuK8Hu0NGXJoekVMtyOF7N7XQ0peU8euPH2xKgSJYLtHz_4K6EqVzFtAJpx-cmSxRGbZVoUOYTdquqFby6FqHHD7QWb0a-bYkM8bRt-EdpS/s1600/Middle-class-buried.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHnu3vo5Cex2COtEMwjn0xjHXJsHFAOahJckuK8Hu0NGXJoekVMtyOF7N7XQ0peU8euPH2xKgSJYLtHz_4K6EqVzFtAJpx-cmSxRGbZVoUOYTdquqFby6FqHHD7QWb0a-bYkM8bRt-EdpS/s1600/Middle-class-buried.jpg" height="224" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">keepthemiddleclassalive.com</td></tr>
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Revolution will come when the aspiring middle classes see their path cut off. And as Reich points out, research all over the country shows this happening. Occasionally, I hear people complain about welfare cheats and Section 8 recipients, and while I don’t condone anybody stealing from the government, what poor people are going to do, legally or illegally, is a drop in the bucket to what we, the middle class, are paying to subsidize the wealthy corporations through direct government transfers and indirect tax breaks. We have a welfare state—it happens to be welfare for the rich. When the government supports the rich, as has done most intensely since 9/11 and the dramatic growth of the military industrial security complex, it is called capitalism. When it redistributes the income so that the poor and middle class can survive the chicanery of the one percent, it is called socialism.
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So I don’t mind a street protest that calls out Google for colluding with the government, for concentrating wealth, for creating secrecy instead of transparency, for doing evil when their credo says they won’t. But don’t bust the windows. Don’t stop the middle class workers (albeit the well-paid middle class workers) from going to work. Vote against 8 Washington if you think it’s really going to hurt the city. These are still sideshows to the main event. We have to take to the streets and the airwaves to urge the one percent to support initiatives that give people healthcare, housing, food, and a voice. We need to protest the Koch Brothers, their ilk, and their level of influence! This is the future of Occupy, and it is our children’s future. Let’s restructure capitalism with intentional action rather than violence. Let's remember love as we resist.<br />
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Kenneth Caldwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11877278524477312027noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5314334776379149827.post-59172468428293031542014-01-24T09:54:00.000-08:002014-01-28T13:23:13.627-08:00Postcard from the UK<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZSiV3GI7sx6uElCwTsqTM89IPMrfjSrnCfCJbhmymJ4zumcAw42cMVk9POS5fW_OBOIcoF8FE-FsUSZvoG_8SvsKfKAgMCGQmHdCg7_kFB1_zUpny-IcjNzwVpxs6ELdssw-FlJPqbJV4/s1600/paul-crabtree.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZSiV3GI7sx6uElCwTsqTM89IPMrfjSrnCfCJbhmymJ4zumcAw42cMVk9POS5fW_OBOIcoF8FE-FsUSZvoG_8SvsKfKAgMCGQmHdCg7_kFB1_zUpny-IcjNzwVpxs6ELdssw-FlJPqbJV4/s1600/paul-crabtree.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></div>
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Our holiday trip to the UK was cold but beautiful. We mixed a city of earthen tones punctuated by red buses with a countryside full of every shade of green. And good food everywhere we went.
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This time Paul booked a late afternoon flight, which meant we arrived in the UK in the afternoon of the next day and only had to power through dinner before we collapsed. It might have worked if we had been in business class and really slept. So although I didn’t crash upon arrival, I was fuzzy for the better part of a week. We took the bus from Heathrow to Victoria Coach Station, which was more fun than the tube because we could see the sights. And it took us right to our hotel, which was at the edge of Belgravia.
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The idea of hospitality and service in hotels has not reached down to the midpriced boutique hotels. But in the middle of winter, you are just glad that they left the heat on. Because it gets dark and frigid in December. When you wake up from an afternoon nap, it’s already nighttime. After we unpacked, we strolled the neighborhood and came across a marvelous shop just across the street. It looked fantastic, but we weren’t altogether sure what it sold. Turned out it was the shop of the genius milliner Philip Treacy.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVUmQvSKi4DiWsIT6_ZPLNDyRPa9acsHJmviatqkvQuNvIwgHp_fEYHHVd28jxPiAxHA3hBzsNpyXm7SHX8An_eL3P8HqDK7XxCpHEtKX6tDRfvCokPZhBaGqnVtHqDskDOnU6-RQnVBrx/s1600/saatchi-gallery.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVUmQvSKi4DiWsIT6_ZPLNDyRPa9acsHJmviatqkvQuNvIwgHp_fEYHHVd28jxPiAxHA3hBzsNpyXm7SHX8An_eL3P8HqDK7XxCpHEtKX6tDRfvCokPZhBaGqnVtHqDskDOnU6-RQnVBrx/s1600/saatchi-gallery.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Saatchi Gallery</td></tr>
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We wandered over to the Duke of York’s Headquarters (constructed in 1801, it was once a school for the children of soldiers’ widows, and later some German spies were court-martialed there), which was converted to the latest version of the Saatchi Gallery in 2008. It’s a stunning building, but the exhibition entitled Body Language was disappointing. In the exhibition New Order: British Art Today, there was one artist I liked, Sara Barker, whose delicate metal and lightly painted canvas sculptures divided space and invited inspection. And the famous oil installation by Richard Wilson, 20:50, has been reconstructed in the new building. (Photos of all three variations can be seen on the Saatchi website.) I loved watching visitors walk in and try to figure out what they are looking at… Eventually the scent of oil, although not overwhelming, gives you a hint.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWdAnMAR2Fu9BfcvAINNQJVbSQ_vsy8LGXgkOfOQD9iEPJJJULPGX0hp2krOl9QGoXSOLh1Vb1ILSIQM2csEuJo10uQC3e-H2FWF0FKdIRGU-kGW-fLUw96tBYrvVMsi0QtjLJwNVEF5Yg/s1600/sculpture-by-sarah-barker.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWdAnMAR2Fu9BfcvAINNQJVbSQ_vsy8LGXgkOfOQD9iEPJJJULPGX0hp2krOl9QGoXSOLh1Vb1ILSIQM2csEuJo10uQC3e-H2FWF0FKdIRGU-kGW-fLUw96tBYrvVMsi0QtjLJwNVEF5Yg/s1600/sculpture-by-sarah-barker.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sculpture by Sarah Barker</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiStBx86p_bBaiBi8slp7RWTSd5LfajW8EXsoymXkSBBZxv1vd6EZF_zyaAfupPOsg1qmnGEzPc5l4S0P4K9SUOalJvFPRTisC9w65cWC8xwhN9dXSAFaeM_C1w7wTqmT70FnCYxQe9Vibu/s1600/richard-wilsons-20.50.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiStBx86p_bBaiBi8slp7RWTSd5LfajW8EXsoymXkSBBZxv1vd6EZF_zyaAfupPOsg1qmnGEzPc5l4S0P4K9SUOalJvFPRTisC9w65cWC8xwhN9dXSAFaeM_C1w7wTqmT70FnCYxQe9Vibu/s1600/richard-wilsons-20.50.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Richard Wilson's 20:50</td></tr>
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We were lucky to find a decent restaurant next door to our hotel, as it had begun to rain. From our vantage point, Christmas was mostly an excuse to meet up with old friends and share a drink or a meal, and not an orgy of bad candy, complex toys, and useless kitchen gadgets. This turned out to be the case among the adults in Paul’s family, if not the kids, which is one reason we like going there so much.
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Paul loves taking the bus in London, even if it takes longer than the tube. We got up at a normal time, walked around the corner, and caught the bus to Somerset House. Our young pal Carlos is spending the semester at the Courtauld Institute of Art, which is just across the courtyard. We should have stopped in to see their collection, too.
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We were lucky to get on one of the buses designed by Thomas Heatherwick, a brilliant young industrial designer best known for the Olympics torch. Unlike the older double deckers, the new model has two staircases, and everything has been thought through, from the swerve of the wraparound glass to the incised pattern in the rubber floor and staircases. We were doubly lucky because the front seat was open upstairs. As we turned every corner, I was like an eager puppy with every new vista of Westminster or Big Ben or other landmark I’ve only seen from the street. The perception is distorted just enough that you feel like you are going to mow down the errant pedestrian. The streets are tight.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxg8pnHB4PXKadzKXj_PdgLn8nasXaeXg8Tcdee6EuBc8mfQIEhCh8rjhdvAxss28rricJWfG4ctoXpdL80SaJ9JqMmnROQrIG6rvg7W6xPACmlqpVkhJyeayurYSHUWF5tCx8coQWWV_v/s1600/new-double-decker-bus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxg8pnHB4PXKadzKXj_PdgLn8nasXaeXg8Tcdee6EuBc8mfQIEhCh8rjhdvAxss28rricJWfG4ctoXpdL80SaJ9JqMmnROQrIG6rvg7W6xPACmlqpVkhJyeayurYSHUWF5tCx8coQWWV_v/s1600/new-double-decker-bus.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">New double-decker bus</td></tr>
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Somerset House hosts all kinds of art shows—not that they always make sense together. Upstairs, they hung the famous Sandham Memorial Chapel paintings by Stanley Spencer, which have been removed while the chapel is being renovated. While they are interesting pieces of postwar art, they didn’t have anything to do with the show I wanted to see: Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore! Isabella Blow is credited with discovering both Alexander McQueen and Philip Treacy. She was born into the end of an aristocracy. Lots of entitlement and no money. Apparently, she bought out McQueen’s entire first collection but didn’t have the money to pay for it, so like the rest of us, she went on the installment plan. The show didn’t reveal a lot about her as a person, but it did show the clothes, hats, and fashion shoots that she had a hand in.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuY5cWdMniujAKeaYs9Mbs3mpM7dyi9Fr3nBb0tclc1M2qCmw2lxnNEzUOw57rE3i_MZz9WlTRKlVIdoRXXk353yXDrnTzquA2VFrWhkBe8yT0UBwOhwH5S-kFpAhS_3ry3ohLJsFfBUZ5/s1600/at-somerset-house-site-of-the-show-isabella-blow-fashion-galore.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuY5cWdMniujAKeaYs9Mbs3mpM7dyi9Fr3nBb0tclc1M2qCmw2lxnNEzUOw57rE3i_MZz9WlTRKlVIdoRXXk353yXDrnTzquA2VFrWhkBe8yT0UBwOhwH5S-kFpAhS_3ry3ohLJsFfBUZ5/s1600/at-somerset-house-site-of-the-show-isabella-blow-fashion-galore.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore!</td></tr>
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In most European cities, we have a pattern of heading out early in the morning after a large breakfast, skipping lunch (or eating very lightly), and then taking a nap before our late afternoon and evening expedition. Scheduling tea during the holidays takes a great deal of planning. Claridges, the Connaught, and the Berkeley were all full, but Paul found a jewel box of a tea room in the Capital Hotel just down from Harrod’s. Maybe slightly less elaborate than a fashion designer-inspired tea we had several years ago at the Berkeley, but sufficient to cover us for lunch and dinner! Paul’s fellow composer pal Cecilia McDowall updated us on her many commissions and performances in the US.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbpMhdK1LIYl5FDp3MaYDk8_ghMZ-QDZ_iyb6MIhjAQx1TCHsDU6e7AitzOgF8hvoETB-K8U7Hb0SKnqTOZH1-CUNQyzJivFwtPjkqgYK8PNHbq3hp_ubDOvbB5TJX4Qt4DkWu1c8e6Yh1/s1600/tea-room-at-capital-hotel.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbpMhdK1LIYl5FDp3MaYDk8_ghMZ-QDZ_iyb6MIhjAQx1TCHsDU6e7AitzOgF8hvoETB-K8U7Hb0SKnqTOZH1-CUNQyzJivFwtPjkqgYK8PNHbq3hp_ubDOvbB5TJX4Qt4DkWu1c8e6Yh1/s1600/tea-room-at-capital-hotel.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tea room at Capital Hotel</td></tr>
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With a short break, we then departed for St. John’s Smith Square, which is a deconsecrated church from 1728 that was firebombed during the war and restored. It now serves as a performance venue. The Cardinall’s Musick, the group that sang Paul’s premiere in Orkney in 2012, was giving a concert. In addition to hearing the beautiful music, afterwards we got to hang out and share a bottle of wine with director Andrew Carwood and singer Patrick Craig (and his folks). Patrick is one of the funniest choral singers I’ve ever met. He could be a standup comic.
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We woke up early the next day and headed out to Borough Market, which is like San Francisco’s Ferry Building but funkier. It’s on the south side of London Bridge and reminds me of an authentic Dickens Christmas Fair. Our destination was the cheese shop, Neal’s Yard Dairy. As they say in the UK, “Oh, that was dear.” But these were some of the best cheeses we’ve ever eaten. For an early lunch, we ducked into a place called Elliot’s, which had a warm proprietor and good food, but suffered from the usual mediocre service.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj601aGH2aeZlm-zaRzNseQabbzug08OAT7nla9vnwKk211UGL1kZoGqu9dt1kKypRxfbqsA-w8tPDEvMvCeBhZs5wrqfsGNWaTrYWpzSRDTAoRofHj7P4hddyEubgElQ8xoTE42ab30EIL/s1600/borough-market.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj601aGH2aeZlm-zaRzNseQabbzug08OAT7nla9vnwKk211UGL1kZoGqu9dt1kKypRxfbqsA-w8tPDEvMvCeBhZs5wrqfsGNWaTrYWpzSRDTAoRofHj7P4hddyEubgElQ8xoTE42ab30EIL/s1600/borough-market.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Borough market</td></tr>
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The train to Rugby (where Paul was born and near where the family still lives) takes just over an hour from Euston Station. After we got off the escalator at the train station, Paul pointed out a bench and said, “That’s the spot where I once spent the night when I missed the last train when I was a teenager.” One day it will have one of those blue ceramic plaques: “Composer Paul Crabtree slept here.” Euston is one of those modern monstrosities of the postwar era. It looks like something from the USSR’s modern bureaucrat period. Our tendency is to arrive early for planes and trains. But there is hardly anyplace to sit, and the cafés couldn’t be any more dreary. There is a growing movement to save modernist buildings in the UK, but I hope they tear this one down.
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Paul sprung for first class, which would have been fine, but some interlopers snuck into our section, which brought out my usual class conflicts. I wanted them thrown out! Within a minute of coming downstairs into the new waiting area at Rugby Station, we saw Aunt Jenny’s beaming face and were whisked back to Orchards.
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Graham and Jenny’s house has two hearts. One is the garden where Graham can be found almost every day except for the rainiest days of winter, and the other is the kitchen, where the heat is always on and something is always being planned, prepared, or “tidied up.”
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The big change in the kitchen is a new range top that is electric but works like gas. Instant heat, and it turns off when you remove a pot so the grandkids don’t get burned. There have been a few changes in the garden since our last visit. But the biggest change is in the view of the garden. Graham had a ribbon window installed along one side of the lounge. It’s so big that it required a new steel beam and steel posts. When he first suggested this, I thought it might be too much view all of the time, but I was wrong. It is especially useful in the winter, when it’s so cold that most visitors don’t want to spend more than a few minutes outside. The orchard has been trimmed and a few birches around the pond removed. There is also a mound to create more of a middle-ground view. In the immediate foreground is a canal or moat around the living room windows. Like a circular water feature, this offers an upside-down view of the tall trees.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5j07dFt309_Ja1QKrJ9UGddqdJTX1XRvNjZ0WRkidpuHeTKwwdyQXynCjfonAY5ivWIeNBMSq8dIck3J2dLC_3XylRyaQYYMsjRYFMhvuwY25t-8Lex06H-4Qg4NRzMbE9_3zGO4E7i4p/s1600/the-new-window-at-orchards.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5j07dFt309_Ja1QKrJ9UGddqdJTX1XRvNjZ0WRkidpuHeTKwwdyQXynCjfonAY5ivWIeNBMSq8dIck3J2dLC_3XylRyaQYYMsjRYFMhvuwY25t-8Lex06H-4Qg4NRzMbE9_3zGO4E7i4p/s1600/the-new-window-at-orchards.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The new window at Orchards.</td></tr>
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Peace was quickly disrupted by all of the cousins in what they call a GnT flash mob. This is the only family I’ve ever spent time with that resembles a rolling party, with members from every age group. After one cocktail, we all had to rush off to church for a caroling service. In this case, church was a 15th-century stone structure just a mile away in Kimcote. Right out of a British mystery, complete with bell ringers and their furry ropes. This congregation installed beer garden–type heaters to keep the faithful warm. We all joked that it was like the TV show Midsomer Murders and that we should find a body just as we were leaving.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii5t8JsatnBuy5OwS-XWevshr6RwmfYUrnVsMdkK2tf3yO57hM_wyP06t9h9ZeRArnBk0OpKgO_LFqnNhE-LbQOpSBQwGOiKSVqiFwAL6SaEvRvC-77uaNWvfqk_yuUH-iwejaXpzC91uf/s1600/christmas-singing-at-kimcote.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii5t8JsatnBuy5OwS-XWevshr6RwmfYUrnVsMdkK2tf3yO57hM_wyP06t9h9ZeRArnBk0OpKgO_LFqnNhE-LbQOpSBQwGOiKSVqiFwAL6SaEvRvC-77uaNWvfqk_yuUH-iwejaXpzC91uf/s1600/christmas-singing-at-kimcote.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Christmas singing at Kimcote</td></tr>
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The next day, our pals Joanna and Tony from Wales came by for lunch. There were tales of Greece (and why it was a mistake for it to join the EU) and Joanna’s family burning down a campsite. Joanna also brought Paul’s beautiful Christmas present, a slender porcelain tower, which took some doing to sneak into the house!<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFmtjGiupfQXtBRhZV7YfLAZBugP1YFy_WFoBmNWbGGpEUmjzMXFtqPaH2DWY3oovlie7iq8ksefA0JkmuJilFxvW_4RMJZl14Et37JhxkDSirbPm0mYZOwzyDizdAhRLDl6jaRvZausEY/s1600/vase-by-joanna-howells-christmas-gift.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFmtjGiupfQXtBRhZV7YfLAZBugP1YFy_WFoBmNWbGGpEUmjzMXFtqPaH2DWY3oovlie7iq8ksefA0JkmuJilFxvW_4RMJZl14Et37JhxkDSirbPm0mYZOwzyDizdAhRLDl6jaRvZausEY/s1600/vase-by-joanna-howells-christmas-gift.JPG" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Christmas gift: vase by Joanna Howells</td></tr>
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The next few days were spent eating, drinking, singing, and opening presents at cousin Jane’s. Her husband, Paul, has become quite the cook. The entire family gathered for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. We sang, ate, laughed, and teased with the affection that closeness brings. It was as Christmas should be.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-N-xDfQMiA34H6_QjNmL3QG9qkHHEPiFPpBVNgmkPASMelwVqBKbURbdRhNN4TPHSEiMgIlsVgUsdd2Lhy3tRUXqO6tyRNxb0Pi6kfS4QK4m7KHyTu_P0yffernsrzbMBJVpojhv4q0Ox/s1600/Paul-Collins-in-his-dream-apron-with-emergency-beer-supply-helmet.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-N-xDfQMiA34H6_QjNmL3QG9qkHHEPiFPpBVNgmkPASMelwVqBKbURbdRhNN4TPHSEiMgIlsVgUsdd2Lhy3tRUXqO6tyRNxb0Pi6kfS4QK4m7KHyTu_P0yffernsrzbMBJVpojhv4q0Ox/s1600/Paul-Collins-in-his-dream-apron-with-emergency-beer-supply-helmet.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Paul Collins in his dream apron with emergency beer supply helmet.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dominic Collins with his Christmas cap on.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cozy Christmas</td></tr>
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Following a relatively quiet Boxing Day, we ventured to Stoke Goldington to see James and Emily Chua and their wonderful daughters and cousins. James is a retired architect who has built a large private garden defined in large part by stone walls that he made by hand. He fells dead trees in a neighboring farmer’s wood and then hand-saws them into specific lengths to heat his home. In the middle of summer, the sun and the small efficient fireplaces heats the entire former barn. One of their daughters is an architect and the other a musician. So there was a lot to talk about. This year it didn’t rain, so we got to see the garden at leisure. A perfect day in the country.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Chua Garden in Stoke Goldington</td></tr>
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When we returned to London, we stayed in Belsize Park, a neighborhood known to fans of Elizabeth George as the home of Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers. It’s a bit more upmarket than it used to be, but it ain’t Belgravia. However, it is home to the actor Sir Derek Jacobi (remember Claudius?), who sat a few seats away from us at the theater. We had to stand in line only a few minutes at the TKTS booth in Leicester Square to get fifth-row seats to Ibsen’s Ghosts, which was some of the best theater either had us in seen in a long time. The set designer uses invisible walls to give the illusion of a manor house on the narrow stage.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Our hotel in Belsize Park</td></tr>
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We also had a good long visit at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where we focused on modern ceramics. Found some by Robin Welch, a potter whose work I bought on a whim 20 years ago. The highlight was seeing the work of potter Lucie Rie and her reconstructed studio. The gift shop revitalized my interest in the Festival of Britain and all it did for modern British design. I feel another post coming on…
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lucie Ries reconstructed studio in the V&A</td></tr>
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When Paul started to get crabby and threatened to get a sandwich from Marks & Spencer, I went into high gear and quickly secured a table at a Lebanese restaurant on Brompton Road. Looking at the prices, I figured the small plates would be, well, small. The servers must have thought, “Those grotesque Americans,” as we ordered more falafel than the table could hold. It was embarrassing. Later in the day, we ventured down to Battersea to have dinner with Paul’s pal Paul Hughes. Another new neighborhood. We had to walk through a public housing project to get there, but we found out it wasn’t dangerous at all.
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If anything is going to get me to live in England (well, part-time in the summer, anyway), it might be a cottage in the countryside. On our last full day, we took the train from Victoria (which feels like a proper train station, unlike Euston) down to Kent to visit Alasdair and David’s new home in Faversham, Rose Cottage. If I understood correctly, the cottage was originally built for one of the gardeners on the local estate. For various reasons, Alasdair and David ended up with an acre of land that spreads out from their dwelling. They already have a tractor to mow the lawn! We are excited to come back in the summer for one of those lengthy, boozy picnics the Brits have to celebrate the brief appearance of the sun. David has a talent for sourcing great home design products that are both cottagey and contemporary. They have given us a tea towel from Lush Designs, and if I had a cottage, I would have their fabrics and lampshades everywhere.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxPEpOXV9HkcfQlsOAkZyxmFnCaA8F7Yt7bCRVYoHZ4tuPLi84IABmlZ3hoUKogKsDC_Gx5dxAO4w1Y6vhdECetTKVv_pyJDrGdqrLQWEQhYcBTAzvZ3nrTOci1VZEbUYMSbMplRrMIq_Q/s1600/the-sky-from-faversham-kent.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxPEpOXV9HkcfQlsOAkZyxmFnCaA8F7Yt7bCRVYoHZ4tuPLi84IABmlZ3hoUKogKsDC_Gx5dxAO4w1Y6vhdECetTKVv_pyJDrGdqrLQWEQhYcBTAzvZ3nrTOci1VZEbUYMSbMplRrMIq_Q/s1600/the-sky-from-faversham-kent.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The sky from Faversham, Kent</td></tr>
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Hope to return in the spring and see everybody again at the Bath Festival!
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More info can be found at:
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<a href="http://www.saatchigallery.com/">www.saatchigallery.com</a><br />
<a href="http://www.somersethouse.org.uk/">www.somersethouse.org.uk</a><br />
<a href="http://www.grahamsgreens.com/">www.grahamsgreens.com</a><br />
<a href="http://www.lushlampshades.co.uk/">www.lushlampshades.co.uk</a><br />
<a href="http://www.bathfestivals.org.uk/">www.bathfestivals.org.uk</a><br />
<a href="http://www.joannahowells.co.uk/">www.joannahowells.co.uk</a>
Kenneth Caldwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11877278524477312027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5314334776379149827.post-39318425837681836172013-12-17T12:01:00.000-08:002013-12-17T12:01:04.556-08:00Best of 2013We are off to the UK to see Paul’s family so I thought I would file this before we lift off.
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<b>Best Historic Memory</b><br />
I am compiling this a few days after Nelson Mandela’s passing. In 1990, with my dear friend from college days, Kristina, we went to hear Mandela speak at the stadium at USC. We met at my place in Baldwin Hills and then joined a long march to USC (where her daughter now attends school). Once we reached the stadium we were standing (I don’t know that we ever sat down) with people of all races and presumably classes. I felt, for that night, we were, as Richard Blanco wrote in his inaugural poem, one people. It is one of those rare times I feel like I witnessed history and knew it was happening.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnPRjZqNXPlyz0yMaxbWFuHBaVW2M1Th8EmQ51uBxYxvFGB_qT0K6Wv-ByhWV6fzFQezoW2juj1dFgsNmvnaMpJnJ8o7EfD40I619SKQTTqjsK7-4VaCLuHr1F_2PwvCKZXUvZV-qfTOJH/s1600/mandela-getty-imgs.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnPRjZqNXPlyz0yMaxbWFuHBaVW2M1Th8EmQ51uBxYxvFGB_qT0K6Wv-ByhWV6fzFQezoW2juj1dFgsNmvnaMpJnJ8o7EfD40I619SKQTTqjsK7-4VaCLuHr1F_2PwvCKZXUvZV-qfTOJH/s1600/mandela-getty-imgs.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nelson Mandela in 1990<br />
Photo: Michel Clement, Daniel Janin/AFP/Getty Images<br />
Courtesy wnyc.org
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<b>Best Political Story</b><br />
Edward Snowden. I think history will see him as a hero who challenged a government gone mad. Much like Daniel Ellsberg did. And he will change the course of our country’s history. And the reporter Glenn Greenwald may not have started out as journalist, but he saved journalism for democracy. Which, of course, saves democracy itself. The shadow government will have to come out of the shadows.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPXMVoi34KzINUKoB9_kvmByBnBfp2MrxmYmV-XlpAMbywbkGq3FNlb6XNEM2guV-kLjHobwkJyyb2KRQRbgc60u3H1_nC7Pllf37HrxAgU6Zpvc6fNRxjd-C0_zHYpGx-OrKvLd0H-W-_/s1600/snowden-getty-imgs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPXMVoi34KzINUKoB9_kvmByBnBfp2MrxmYmV-XlpAMbywbkGq3FNlb6XNEM2guV-kLjHobwkJyyb2KRQRbgc60u3H1_nC7Pllf37HrxAgU6Zpvc6fNRxjd-C0_zHYpGx-OrKvLd0H-W-_/s1600/snowden-getty-imgs.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: The Guardian, AFP/Getty Images</td></tr>
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<b>Best Rediscovered Artist</b><br />
A few years ago I went to an art fair in San Francisco and saw a few pieces of an artist named Jay Kelly. I can’t quite afford his work but it is one “material” thing I crave. His website is <a href="http://www.jaykellyart.com/">jaykellyart.com</a>.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEia6317djNQx-OA_gcUYDLz2lWhrLyjmj5IxAUNBHXr_Z3piWb6tw5cD8qVBT0hPLRZsklAW8-uF4CDSFuyBauM679Gxs0qaJPAm-mAkxHUlGPPDQZffThR500pQIqPihwR1I-t46egVZKQ/s1600/jay-kelly.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEia6317djNQx-OA_gcUYDLz2lWhrLyjmj5IxAUNBHXr_Z3piWb6tw5cD8qVBT0hPLRZsklAW8-uF4CDSFuyBauM679Gxs0qaJPAm-mAkxHUlGPPDQZffThR500pQIqPihwR1I-t46egVZKQ/s1600/jay-kelly.jpg" width="227" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">2009 Metal, Wood, Gesso, Acrylic<br />
Jay Kelly Art</td></tr>
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<b>Best New Print</b><br />
What I could afford this year was a print Caio Fonseca made at Paulson Bott Press in 1998. I keep following the lines somewhere different.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaPlUuGWi6DW3vCnKio5YZ8z8wvc8tqN0G5mp7HpPg5To3Sb7-cVJfA2eOBzaUno7EuLB0g2aWAhrkt-ceZro5ENwYT6sMhdz2jkCfEWpN__XipB02H5ETa-28iVq84ncMBxvB55D4RJCV/s1600/seca-notations-1-paulson-bott.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaPlUuGWi6DW3vCnKio5YZ8z8wvc8tqN0G5mp7HpPg5To3Sb7-cVJfA2eOBzaUno7EuLB0g2aWAhrkt-ceZro5ENwYT6sMhdz2jkCfEWpN__XipB02H5ETa-28iVq84ncMBxvB55D4RJCV/s1600/seca-notations-1-paulson-bott.jpg" width="306" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Caio Fonseca<br />
Notations I, 1998<br />
courtesy paulsonbottpress.com</td></tr>
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<b>Best Tote Bag</b><br />
Dear friend Johnny gave me this Andy Warhol bag for my birthday! Isn’t it the best?
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<b>Best New Satchel</b><br />
My pals Maria and Chris gave me this British Schoolboy bag from Cambridge satchels. Isn’t it perfect? Had to put it on Pinterest right away!
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIbpMqQyQh1j1nI-SbI-18IXxYhfjJ0UXgyFaDKqB4r2qNUy8f9xPsNKATggYpVhmsPqdwbiKU7lxK2t3xle2zh6N0KfqlF0D_GGwgCUh_7KY6DAWewq7vKF-l70NlX-Vsk7FUQiqePHr7/s1600/satchel.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIbpMqQyQh1j1nI-SbI-18IXxYhfjJ0UXgyFaDKqB4r2qNUy8f9xPsNKATggYpVhmsPqdwbiKU7lxK2t3xle2zh6N0KfqlF0D_GGwgCUh_7KY6DAWewq7vKF-l70NlX-Vsk7FUQiqePHr7/s1600/satchel.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">cambridgesatchel.com</td></tr>
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<b>Best New Source for Bow Ties</b><br />
For an early holiday gift my dear friend (from the seventh grade onward!) Cherie gave both of us gorgeous bow ties. We looked inside and the label said Kathleen Kelley. Sure enough it is the same Kathleen Kelley who worked at MBT and later at EBay. One of the most elegant ladies I've ever met. Check out her site at <a href="http://www.kathleenkelleyartisan.com/">kathleenkelleyartisan.com</a>.<br />
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<b>Best Local Restaurant</b><br />
We finally got around to going to Comal in downtown Berkeley. Excellent high-end Mexican food and a great dining room. If you don’t have much time before the theater you can also walk right out to the patio (with a fireplace) where a lady comes out around with a taco chip and margarita trolley. <a href="http://www.comalberkeley.com/">comalberkeley.com</a>
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<b>Best NY Restaurant</b><br />
My pal in Brooklyn Noel took me to Vinegar Hill House in Dumbo. It’s a bit out of the way, but has the best pate I’ve had in ages. Spatially it’s quirky and intimate. Not for the big boned gal. Check out the tiny kitchen with three people and a brick oven. I would lose weight working there. The after dinner nighttime walk on the Brooklyn waterfront was magical. <a href="http://www.vinegarhillhouse.com/">vinegarhillhouse.com</a>
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<b>Best (and Strangest) Thai Food</b><br />
I’ve never thought of DC as a good restaurant town, but apparently that’s changing. My pal Kristina took me to Little Serrow, which is owned by the same folks who own Komi, which has gotten rave reviews but costs a pretty penny. Downstairs in the basement through an unmarked door is a very noisy aqua colored room with a painted corrugated metal ceiling and not one stitch of Thai inspired tourist dreck. Just high tables, stools and a fixed fresh family style menu. It is spicy but not light your mouth (and digestive track) on fire hot. But each week its different. If you have food allergies forget it. And you had better get in line at 5:15. No reservations and the door opens at 5:30. The the few seats fill fast. <a href="http://littleserrow.com/">littleserrow.com</a><br />
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<b>Best Social Media Toy</b><br />
Speaking of Pinterest, it is hands down my favorite social media toy. I have no idea how it is influencing my “brand.” Being a visual person it is a way to chart my interests, especially the aesthetic ones. It’s like an autobiography in photos. A harmless addiction right?
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<b>Best Wedding/Adoption Celebration</b><br />
David and Jay’s celebration of their wedding and adoption was full love, tears, wine, and good food. You can read about it here (<a href="http://seekingfatherhood.com/adoption/more-and-more-married">http://seekingfatherhood.com/adoption/more-and-more-married</a>) and here (<a href="http://queersage.blogspot.com/2013/09/in-church-on-birmingham-sunday.html">http://queersage.blogspot.com/2013/09/in-church-on-birmingham-sunday.html</a>) and here (<a href="http://www.sfgate.com/style/unionsquared/article/First-came-kids-then-vows-for-David-Kerr-Jay-4849519.php">http://www.sfgate.com/style/unionsquared/article/First-came-kids-then-vows-for-David-Kerr-Jay-4849519.php</a>). It was a big deal.
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<b>Best Wedding/Adoption Celebration Photographer</b><br />
Gabriel Harber did a great job on David and Jay’s celebration so I thought I should give him a plug! <a href="http://harberphotography.com/">www.harberphotography.com</a>
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<b>Best Art Show(s)</b><br />
We saw all three James Turrell shows. Although the exhibit at the Guggenheim was the most spectacular of the three shows (I mean any show that can get socialites to lie down on the floor of the Guggenheim must be a good thing!). I loved the quietude of the Houston show. You never perceive light the same after seeing a great Turrell piece. Question what you think you see.
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<b>Best Architecture Show</b><br />
The A Quincy Jones show at the Hammer in LA. It’s about time he got a show. Besides my deep affection for his wife Elaine (who was mentioned in the show) I felt that his architecture was influenced by a sense of humility. He was trying to figure out the best possible solution to a set of challenges, not building a monument to his own ego. If I were ever to do a book about architecture I would call it “The Humble Moderns: Architecture That Disappears.” Folks like Quincy, Renzo Piano, Joe Esherick, Ralph Rapson, David Salmela. My kind of architecture.
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<b>Best Book(s)</b><br />
It was not a big year for reading books. But I did enjoy Donna Tartt’s new novel, The Goldfinch. I probably liked the gay adolescent love story detail the most. A kind of sweetness within mayhem. On the architecture front, I really enjoyed my pal Pierluigi’s book on Bay Area modernist Don Olsen. Due to the author’s efforts in this and earlier books we aren’t going to lose the modernist narrative in Northern California.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVvUQeSf8bfYl5Lkm7t85CA3xEwlk7HT9mBNnr3vCDypgHZ8i8D2hXeqNfqFnvK5w2arXNjlszt60lHDha_vgS6YRtmvJWPqLFnGYKLLe7Y5MFLDLfr8iKWjpOUA7kPZ0svYrChWIhqlgj/s1600/olsen9.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVvUQeSf8bfYl5Lkm7t85CA3xEwlk7HT9mBNnr3vCDypgHZ8i8D2hXeqNfqFnvK5w2arXNjlszt60lHDha_vgS6YRtmvJWPqLFnGYKLLe7Y5MFLDLfr8iKWjpOUA7kPZ0svYrChWIhqlgj/s1600/olsen9.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Donald Olsen: Architect of Habitable Abstractions<br />
by Pierluigi Serraino</td></tr>
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<b>Best Celebrity</b><br />
These days the only celebrities I meet are artists thanks to my gig with Paulson Bott Press. I interviewed Maira Kalman and she was as enthusiastic and curious as her drawings suggest. You can read the interviews here (<a href="http://www.paulsonbottpress.com/about/oktp/oktp_kalman.pdf">http://www.paulsonbottpress.com/about/oktp/oktp_kalman.pdf</a>) and here (<a href="http://paulsonbottpress.blogspot.com/2013/10/maira-kalman.html">http://paulsonbottpress.blogspot.com/2013/10/maira-kalman.html</a>).
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Easter Parade" 1996<br />
mairakalman.com</td></tr>
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<b>Best Growing Experience</b><br />
See wedding. It has been the presence of David and Jay’s kids, Shayla and Jaden. I would have been a terrible parent, but I’m a pretty fun uncle!
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See you in 2014!
Kenneth Caldwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11877278524477312027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5314334776379149827.post-13532740150185651232013-12-05T07:29:00.000-08:002013-12-05T07:29:10.628-08:00Postcard from Disneyland<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The Facebook photos do not lie. I spent a few days on vacation in Disneyland. It was my pal David’s 50th birthday, and he wanted to show his kids the Magic Kingdom. His husband Jay grew up in the San Fernando Valley and fondly remembers visiting on Christmas Day with all the other Jewish families. And I got to go along as the lucky uncle! I could go on about how evil the Disney empire is, but I could also go on about how evil the automobile corporations are, and how evil most banks and mutual funds are, but the truth is that most of us participate, to some degree or another, in these evil empires. A friend of mine wrote to me, “Ask why there are no pigeons or mosquitoes” in Disneyland. That gave me pause. It is important to observe, and maintain a state of critical inquiry, but some questions remain unanswerable.
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It was Charles Moore who gave me a new way to look at Disneyland. He wrote about it famously in Perspecta in an essay entitled “You Have to Pay for the Public Life.” That gave the place cred with the intellectual set. But it was his essay in the guidebook Los Angeles: The City Observed that I treasure. He didn’t live long enough to see Disney California Adventure open in 2001, but this newer park has captured some of his love for Los Angeles.
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At several levels, Disneyland can be seen as a mirror for the culture. Think about it. It takes an entire subterranean system, endless back lots, and the largest parking garage in the Western hemisphere to make the happiest place on earth function. You don’t see dirty uniforms, nor do you see most of the “cast” that keeps the pedestrian-centric drama going. They are invisible (behind the scenes or in costumes), and so is the ugly car that brought you here. It parallels an idealized life in our own country, but without pigeons and mosquitoes! Easy transit and parking, plentiful clothes, access to nature, controlled density, fresh fruit and veggies year round—all this provided by workers who are largely invisible to us as they toil in the dangerous factories and warehouses of the developing world, the oil tundras of the Middle East, and the fields of God knows where. It takes a huge number of people working in poverty to keep each one of us clothed, housed, fed, and entertained. Disneyland is a microcosm of the global economy that supports our way of life! But without most of the stresses.
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What makes Disneyland’s appeal so broad? Why do people keep returning when a one-day ticket to both parks now costs $132? (Never mind the $30 lunches and $300 hotel rooms.) It is because the Disney theme parks are some of the most designed places on earth. Walt Disney believed in the power of design more than any other capitalist I can think of. There have been numerous biographies of Disney, but I am interested in one that focuses on his ideas about aesthetics. What were those conversations about design and narrative like? When Disney built a new studio in 1940 in Burbank, he hired noted modernist designer Kem Weber (whose furniture now fetches high prices at auction and is featured in museum collections) to give it a modern edge, with most workspaces accessible to daylight.
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Disney was obsessed with detail and would spend large sums to make his animations better and to innovate. He gambled on new technologies, and often he won. He understood and exploited media synergies to great advantage. When we were kids, we watched Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color every Sunday night and hoped to see shots of the park we had just visited. We only went to a handful of films as a family, and, of course, Mary Poppins was one of them. Each kind of product helped built interest in another. What child in the United States doesn’t know Mickey Mouse (who would have been named Mortimer if Lillian Disney hadn’t had some sway)?
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But Disneyland can also be painful. For a child, it is a rich experience, one that lasts well into adulthood. Of course, new films appear, the culture changes, and a theme park must evolve, and in terms of a child’s memory, change radically. Each visit is both nostalgic and sad. When I was young, in the mid-1960s, my favorite icon was the Monsanto House of the Future. I wanted to live there! Tomorrowland felt like a real look into the next decade, which I was impatient to reach. By the time the futuristic house was torn down in the late 1960s, tomorrow was yesterday’s news. Even though the monorail cars have gone through several generations of improvement, they look sort of silly now. It’s hard to say if the future ended when man stepped on the moon, but the future is no longer a place, it’s a cloud. And Tomorrowland feels placeless now. There are still submarines, but now they are all about Captain Nemo.… If you don’t keep up with popular culture (brought to you by Disney and Pixar), visiting Disneyland can be a bit like walking through a dream where you don’t know the cues.
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One day for lunch we ate “outside” on the terrace at Blue Bayou, where you are part of the entertainment for the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. When I was a kid, passing that romantic café before descending into the watery depths, I wondered where it was located. I probably thought the customers were part of the latest technology, what I later learned was called animatronics. When I was slightly older, I wondered if they were actors. Then I thought perhaps you get a free lunch to perform as happy diners in nighttime New Orleans. In fact, you pay dearly to be part of the show. And this is one the genius concepts of Disneyland. You are a cast member too! When you are too exhausted to go on, finding a bench (outside the restrooms, which are based on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Storer house) and watching this strangely egalitarian parade is almost a fun as looking at the ones that Disney organizes throughout the day. That you can do at no extra charge.
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As for the Pirates ride itself, I don’t think it is as much fun since it’s been redesigned around a kohl-eyed Johnny Depp. The same is true for the haunted house, which has been temporarily reconfigured to celebrate Tim Burton’s Christmas. I rather enjoyed Burton’s creepy characters in MoMA’s show a few years ago, but they seem forced in the haunted house. I have to say that the ginger cookie smell that was spritzed at us was especially noxious. But both Johnny Depp and Tim Burton must be a bit surprised that they turned up as features in a Disney theme park. Had Uncle Walt met them on Main Street, he would have had security throw the bums out!
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On a trip to California Adventure in 2006, I found the newer park strangely barren, too vast, without the variety of scale and density, mature landscaping, and all-important berms of the original park. Much as the basis for the Disneyland entrance sequence is based on Walt Disney’s own boyhood in Missouri, the new Buena Vista Street and Carthay Circle are based on the Los Angeles that Disney experienced when he arrived and first began working in the city he would end up interpreting for the rest of us. The Imagineers went back to their roots, Walt’s own nostalgia.<br />
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Interestingly, one of the most popular rides in the old Disneyland park is Autopia, which trains the wee ones for the autocentric future (architect Charles Moore is especially funny on this point). It is also one of the oldest continuously operating rides. Building on that ongoing success (I love that the ride is in Tomorrowland) and the success of the Cars movies series (what’s better than to turn the devil itself, the automobile, into something loveable?), the Imagineers created an entire themed “land.” Irony builds on irony. You park your car a good 20 minutes from the entry to either Disneyland or California Adventure and then walk 20 minutes to wait between 20 and 90 minutes to ride in a miniature car for four or five minutes. Brilliant! But the waiting at Radiator Springs Racers is almost as good as the ride. Beautiful desert landscaping and even a reproduction of a historic bottle house. Reportedly the ride cost $200 million to build. It’s more tied to the Southwest than to California, but who cares? It’s still about cars and movies.
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When you walk through Radiator Springs, past the Flo’s V8 Café with its piston supported canopies and the Cozy Cone Motel based on wigwam motels, you see the glorious peaks of Cadillac Range, a spoof on the avant-garde artist collective Cadillac Ranch. Somehow the Ant Farm’s crazy art project in Amarillo, Texas, has been co-opted for Disneyland. It’s almost as sweet as the hippie geodesic dome, which must house some drug taking commune-ists. (Check out the Jumping Jellyfish for a drug-inspired ride!) Even though the founder of the happiest place on earth might be appalled that the counterculture has influenced his squeaky-clean dream, he would love to hear the cash registers ringing—or pinging.
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For more information:
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<a href="http://www.waltdisney.org/">http://www.waltdisney.org/</a>
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<a href="http://passport2dreams.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-awkward-transitions-of-disneyland.html">http://passport2dreams.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-awkward-transitions-of-disneyland.html</a>
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<a href="http://www.themagazineantiques.com/articles/kem-weber-southern-california/">http://www.themagazineantiques.com/articles/kem-weber-southern-california/</a>
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<a href="http://www.planetizen.com/node/49293">http://www.planetizen.com/node/49293</a>
Kenneth Caldwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11877278524477312027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5314334776379149827.post-36211230354788116922013-11-12T15:09:00.000-08:002013-11-12T15:36:43.860-08:00Postcard from Chicago<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiU8JIn0z6EY0yJAi715QeojGv0Trx3a1EGJi3sequ1dXYw6hHOgOysfxKLsZdax3uLgBm2JTwblGmCWFtM-c27kHS2Io3pqqWQs6exbKOTfFDurQo7rTVcm3V54M185aoNTuwAnjTK_Eiz/s1600/IMG_0456.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiU8JIn0z6EY0yJAi715QeojGv0Trx3a1EGJi3sequ1dXYw6hHOgOysfxKLsZdax3uLgBm2JTwblGmCWFtM-c27kHS2Io3pqqWQs6exbKOTfFDurQo7rTVcm3V54M185aoNTuwAnjTK_Eiz/s320/IMG_0456.jpg" width="239" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Room with a view</td></tr>
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Chicago reminds me a little of Seattle. Visit in good weather, and you’re ready to move there. The early autumn varied between “warm” and “light sweater required.” I love the form of this city. Great giant orange and silver light boxes strung along the shore of a moody Milton Avery sea (of course it’s really a lake) with intermittent parks, followed by a ring of gritty brick buildings fading into green leafy suburbs. The intensity of the city ends at a highway (named Lakeshore Drive as if it were meandering and calm) and then a beach and then the great beyond. It’s a modern city shaped by Miesian boxes cheek by jowl with the late 19th and early 20th century industrial city of lower densities. Back porches and bedrooms snug up to the elevated railroad. The El works surprisingly well, but this is still a city where you need a car to get across town. And the commute patterns are more and more from suburb to suburb. Which means the freeways are clogged up during the day just like in Los Angeles or Seattle! Or any thriving American metropolis.
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We were in Chicago because Chicago A Cappella commissioned Paul to write a piece for the group’s 20th anniversary. It was a complex song based on the poem “The Windhover” by Gerald Manley Hopkins. I didn’t even know a windhover was a bird until Paul wrote this piece. A young priest sees the bird and knows where his true path lies.
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Paul taught a master class in the Rockefeller Cathedral on the University of Chicago campus one morning. An impressive neogothic cathedral designed by Bertram Goodhue. But there is something weird about a grand church named after a grand capitalist. Maybe that reveals a deeper truth about this campus?
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rockefeller Cathedral</td></tr>
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While Paul was teaching, I wandered over to check out the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, the site of Paul’s concert. The tower anchors the southwest corner of the campus. It is also next to a pretty rough neighborhood. On the night of the Chicago A Cappella performance, cops on every corner stood guard. The limestone conveys both solidity and lightness. Stacking the dense program also allowed for a generous courtyard. There are two entrances—one from the street near the midway and then a porte cochere in the rear. But I wondered who would arrive that way—folks in chauffeured town cars?
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Williams/Tsien - <br />
Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts</td></tr>
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Next door is the School of Social Service Administration, which I had never seen before. I stumbled across it and thought it was a wonderful Miesian pavilion, only to realize that the master himself designed it. It doesn’t take too much digging to find out it was built because Lillian Greenwald, widow of Herbert Greenwald, perhaps Mies’s most important patron, was a generous donor to the School of Social Service Administration. I was shooed out because of some small function going on in the lobby, so I will have to tour the interiors on the next visit. A casual glance suggested it was mostly intact.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh98dVfdjHLL1MtwWrswQ8Ck3lArJ3GjYzCy60PVFWDVEz8wWKNQ8LRVXKPcliVl6JV-6_2uAo00yvTpFuY6XlUc36RTdE_F-GkdKAmX_M_cdyuhm1mZQ94djbHrWmAIhvtDZFeFHMvua-X/s1600/IMG_0468.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh98dVfdjHLL1MtwWrswQ8Ck3lArJ3GjYzCy60PVFWDVEz8wWKNQ8LRVXKPcliVl6JV-6_2uAo00yvTpFuY6XlUc36RTdE_F-GkdKAmX_M_cdyuhm1mZQ94djbHrWmAIhvtDZFeFHMvua-X/s320/IMG_0468.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mies van der Rohe - School of Social Service Administration</td></tr>
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The surprise was the Laird Bell Law Quadrangle by Eero Saarinen. Unlike Mies, Saarinen was interested in what was next door to his future buildings. Mies was a European modernist. The new rules were based on some of the old rules, but damn the existing buildings. They wouldn’t last. One could say Saarinen was a more place-based modernist. He didn’t want decorations or class-rooted readings of his buildings, but he also understood the value of what went before him. His courtyard with its sheet of water is beautiful. The law library does not imitate the predominant neogothic architecture of the early campus, but it does try to be a friendly neighbor with its crenellated top and rhythms.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Eero Saarinen - Laird Bell Law Quadrangle</td></tr>
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In an ironic twist, architect Rafael Viñoly took Saarinen’s concept of creating a modern building that respected historic precedents even further at the Charles M. Harper Center at the Booth School of Business. One of the main challenges for the project was that the university had to tear down an Eero Saarinen building. However, the Woodward Court dorms were not the famed architect’s best effort. Viñoly not only created a contemporary building with gothic tracery in the structure of the atrium, but also reduced the building’s scale as it approaches the corner across the street from Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece, the Robie House. Horizontal forms and a simple cantilever gently reference Wright’s work. The building accomplishes something few campus buildings do coherently; it’s big when it needs to be big and small when it needs to be small.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rafael Viñoly - <br />
Charles M. Harper Center at the Booth School of Business</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Frank Lloyd Wright - Robie House</td></tr>
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On the eastern edge of campus, we also checked out the new Earl Shapiro Hall for the university’s acclaimed Laboratory Schools. My pals (and clients) Valerio Dewalt Train also had to negotiate a contemporary expression in the context of the neogothic style. Since the site was a few blocks east of the campus core, they could bend the rules a bit more. The building folds in some surprising ways, but it remains a highly legible building. Blair Kamin likes it too! (<a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-10-12/news/ct-ae-1013-lab-school-20131012_1_chicago-laboratory-schools-nursery-school-joe-valerio">http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-10-12/news/ct-ae-1013-lab-school-20131012_1_chicago-laboratory-schools-nursery-school-joe-valerio</a>)
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Valerio Dewalt Train - Shapiro Hall, UC Lab School</td></tr>
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We were foolish enough to venture north on the day before the Chicago Marathon to see Renzo Piano’s addition to the Art Institute. But it was worth the trek (and $30 parking fee!). Piano inserted a simple, light structure into a collage of historic structures. He saw that Frank Gehry’s band shell for Grant Park concluded the main axis of his design, and he celebrates the fact. This is what I love about Piano. He is confident enough to give another contemporary architect his due. And as with many of Piano’s additions, a great deal of the fun lies in watching how the building frames human movement and inquiry.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Renzo Piano - Chicago Art Institute Addition</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Renzo Piano - Chicago Art Institute Addition</td></tr>
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Our home base for this trip was Evanston, the first suburb beyond Chicago’s city limits. Next time we will check out Northwestern University and report back. We stayed in a <i>Fawlty Towers</i> kind of hotel apartment complex from the 1920s with a stunning view of the lake. One morning, we walked around the residential precinct next to the lake, which has to be one of the prettiest neighborhoods we’ve ever seen. A friend of mine whose partner grew up there said, “Oh yes, it’s a happy place.”
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Evanston - A Happy Place</td></tr>
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Kenneth Caldwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11877278524477312027noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5314334776379149827.post-79680953746211107572013-09-23T19:14:00.000-07:002013-09-23T19:35:02.818-07:00Larry Fournier<b>Mentor and Friend</b>
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There have been waves of loss in my life. In young adulthood, many people were taken by AIDS and related disorders. This slackened somewhat when protease inhibitors were introduced. Shorty thereafter, my parents and my friends’ parents began to pass away. And now, when I’m in my 50s, friends from my age onwards are getting sick and dying. On Friday, my good friend and mentor Larry Fournier passed away when his kidney failed. He was the thread that connected so many relationships that moved all over the continuum from professional to personal.
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I met Larry in 1983 when he moved from ELS to Whisler-Patri to become marketing director. He found ways to stretch his budget to hire my sister for a stint when she was between semesters in medical school, and he hired a good pal of mine to take over the slide library when she needed a new job. There are hundreds of these stories. He was always willing to help, but he also expected you to help yourself. If you did, he would be loyal and available forever. We both held degrees in library science but somehow ended up helping architects get work. This is because we loved design, but we also loved those who found it their calling. Larry started out organizing Lawrence Halprin’s slides and became the leader of our profession in the Bay Area. He was not a salesman. He was a connector. One by one, he linked people to each other.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Larry and George at Larry's retirement party.</td></tr>
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Many years ago, he knew that his kidney was failing and that he would need a transplant. I was amazed by his calm and courage. His brother came out from Louisiana and bravely donated one of his kidneys. This gave Larry several more years of a good life. He worked hard but made it look easy. He entertained brilliantly in his home in the Berkeley hills and later in Sonoma. After he returned from a trip to Japan, I remember him making the most meticulously prepared Japanese meals. They must have taken him days. He often invited people to stay in Sonoma when they were troubled or lost or just wanting a few days off. He knew what people needed. He didn’t judge much unless you deceived him. He connected me to ELS, where I worked for seven years as marketing director in the 1990s and made many friends. He would drop by the office on Addison Street in downtown Berkeley to be sure he had left his role in good hands. From him, I learned how valuable it is to make a gracious exit. Not only was he my friend, he was one of my key mentors. I also learned that one can be both modest and confident.
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George was his partner the entire time I knew Larry. Over the years, as gay couples became part of the cultural milieu, they were both present at many industry events. The two firms where Larry worked the last three decades were relatively conservative, but he taught them that gay people are like anybody else. He just did it by being present and authentic. George was the quiet half, but he always saw the humor that was part of what made the connecting work. I remember seeing in their home a framed check that George wrote Larry when they moved in together in North Beach. They were not embarrassed to say they met at Buzzby’s, an (in)famous Polk Street disco in the 1970s. George makes things, beautiful things from wood. When George needed his own shop, they moved from their Berkeley hills home to a then-rough area of Dogpatch in San Francisco, living in the apartment over the shop. Several months ago, their regular dinner group invited Paul and me to join them there for one of their gourmet meals. It was raucous, delicious, and funny. Towards the end of the evening, Jane Glickman’s husband, John, decided to take a formal group portrait. It was the last time I saw Larry.
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<br />Kenneth Caldwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11877278524477312027noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5314334776379149827.post-1178934619337732492013-09-09T16:58:00.000-07:002013-09-09T17:19:23.860-07:00Postcard from Houston<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Everybody maligns Houston. I like it. But then, I like Los Angeles, too. Houston reminds me a lot of Los Angeles, but with more humidity, more parking, and slightly less traffic. It is much easier to navigate. Basically everything that you are interested in is inside the Interstate 610 loop. So while the city sprawls outward forever, most of the good stuff is within a relatively small circle—unlike Los Angeles.
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First, let’s talk about the town of no zoning. This means high-rises next to mansions, laundries across the street from a Dan Flavin installation, dance halls next to middle-class residential districts. Apparently, there are codes on how property can be subdivided, but the voters have turned down zoning repeatedly. Not an experiment worth repeating, perhaps, but it does create some bizarre adjacencies.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The laundry across the street from the Menil Flavin installation.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Museum of Fine Arts - wing by Mies van der Rohe</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Quaker meeting house with skyspace by James Turrell</td></tr>
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Reyner Banham reintroduced Californians to Los Angeles and got people to see it with fresh eyes. Architect Carlos Jiménez did that for Houston. I heard him lecture a long time ago. He asks you to look at the sky, at the possibilities of a new city.
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The Houstonian Hotel is one of those buildings where the architecture is irrelevant and the décor is everything. I call it “we are rich now” décor. Some of the fabrics and details are lovely, but the overall effect is sort of Hearst Castle for the parvenu. But that doesn’t mean it’s not fun! In Houston, like Los Angeles, you just add water and you have a jungle. Nobody remembers that the Houstonian is actually a banal, modern, office park-like structure, but rather that all the rooms look out onto dense foliage. It’s like staying in a baroque terrarium!<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Houstonian lobby</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Houstonian pool and jungle</td></tr>
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Driving around Houston, we did smell gas occasionally. This is a town built on oil. Even the parts that I am drawn to—the art and architecture that arrived with the largesse of the de Menil family—came about because of oil. The Schlumberger oil drilling fortune paid for the Rothkos, Philip Johnson, and Walter De Maria. The most challenging and spiritual of good works are rooted in Texas gold.
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Driving is a divine right in Texas, and nobody bothers with a Prius. It’s all about big fortress cars being aggressive on the freeways. We had a few near-accidents. Some of this is to due to the confusion of the lane markers and last-second lane changes. But when you are sitting by the pool, these folks couldn’t be nicer, and everybody wants to help you find a good restaurant. Foodie culture has definitely come to Houston. Two places that we tried and enjoyed were Hugo’s, which offers haute Mexican cuisine, and Triniti, which would have fit right into any affluent coastal city in California.
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Our purpose in visiting Houston was to see the James Turrell exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts. (More on that in a later post.) We nearly missed an exquisite show at the Menil Collection entitled Byzantine Things in the World, which links various pieces in the Menil Collection over history. Although I still struggle with Cy Twombly’s work, the lighting (only natural light when we visited) in the Twombly Gallery at the Menil is simply stunning in its subtlety. That little building is one of Renzo Piano’s great accomplishments in lighting. If only he had done the Rothko Chapel! We were also lucky enough to stumble on Soo Sunny Park’s sculpture at the Rice Gallery. Although made of chain link fence and Plexiglas, the sculptures seem to float and change shape before your eyes.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9LyXC5f4O_Sjj331Ze9XilW12A1Kk8cmPVUhDf_cbOBub922P09MkKIW3SI5Z42GCNE6MwDIcqilzLf_tOHPk0HhcdD5XBy4RUEBLTtNeTDYnV5SLG56MBIdrs0WaGY5igayq9wuJjxyR/s1600/100_1224.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9LyXC5f4O_Sjj331Ze9XilW12A1Kk8cmPVUhDf_cbOBub922P09MkKIW3SI5Z42GCNE6MwDIcqilzLf_tOHPk0HhcdD5XBy4RUEBLTtNeTDYnV5SLG56MBIdrs0WaGY5igayq9wuJjxyR/s320/100_1224.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rothko Chapel with sculpture <br />
by Barnett Newman (gift of the de Menils)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9wJgvKW2d4IKYR2ZJzVXFlx0C7RDCbg3X1oRjogRBzOTAsUmIVav4jhomCufpCme20IfiqwJEdbatDsb9MsM-VL8Oz4G0f8dFgyeZyDarS2WVofREGp7D3yUrNvhIy6tw9gotU3rIBye3/s1600/100_1280.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9wJgvKW2d4IKYR2ZJzVXFlx0C7RDCbg3X1oRjogRBzOTAsUmIVav4jhomCufpCme20IfiqwJEdbatDsb9MsM-VL8Oz4G0f8dFgyeZyDarS2WVofREGp7D3yUrNvhIy6tw9gotU3rIBye3/s320/100_1280.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> Soo Sunny Park’s
exhibit at Rice University</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_jrgs8zsQaunDXDBk1mZsVASyS8IXmkvVh6c1-vaRb7Rjo92DxR2yHN56Gsrfc2PfUYwO6FuHrLbgEERzmG-IjfB_bn-fu7a9nM9g-dw-lNEdecrWiAHOWiLyvMxAvxYvIsnJPLKZLWRe/s1600/100_1309.JPG" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_jrgs8zsQaunDXDBk1mZsVASyS8IXmkvVh6c1-vaRb7Rjo92DxR2yHN56Gsrfc2PfUYwO6FuHrLbgEERzmG-IjfB_bn-fu7a9nM9g-dw-lNEdecrWiAHOWiLyvMxAvxYvIsnJPLKZLWRe/s320/100_1309.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
Another architectural highlight was tracking down the de Menil’s home (designed by Philip Johnson in 1950) on San Felipe Drive. There are no sidewalks on that section of the busy street so you have to park on a side street and walk on along a verge and cross the street and peek down the drive. Johnson fought with Mrs. de Menil over the windows on the right side of the front elevation. She won. He hated them. But he really hated the interiors by her Charles James, her fashion designer. Now they are legendary. James knew that Johnson needed to be softened up several decades before he realized it. Unfortunately, the public can’t visit the house but it is owned by the Menil Foundation and completed a extensive restoration about ten years ago. By the time we returned to where we had parked, two cars from the River Oaks Patrol were on us. The ruling class don’t screw around. I doubt the security folks get many people telling them they are architectural writers checking out significant landmarks. Because from what we could see River Oaks doesn’t have very many!
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZtfY6JT04vZswaJ4ecVPKIKEOhx4sJ32FU8HkfYIoxEOYl0oGS-8qi-mtltL_up34lleMkv1a20ErMgUjk1fUI5iaJOIbnVJSTRC7_5lnLKYVTUZbs83q_piOrf_cYssC45GnzQr4Afiq/s1600/typical-River-Oaks-residence.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZtfY6JT04vZswaJ4ecVPKIKEOhx4sJ32FU8HkfYIoxEOYl0oGS-8qi-mtltL_up34lleMkv1a20ErMgUjk1fUI5iaJOIbnVJSTRC7_5lnLKYVTUZbs83q_piOrf_cYssC45GnzQr4Afiq/s320/typical-River-Oaks-residence.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Typical River Oaks residence</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqCKP9C-TkCUuV317OW_PxtuY_ba0tGz3K0c5HNkI69EVJ-ev62MDipH8_WPcAAQJmohzXUEw9-juE2LwObu6CbZvUzP8uwJl5xovNrGQtS_OybaR7UCYGAcM2saAJxNekToOeSGQjTtgv/s1600/DeMenil-Residence.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqCKP9C-TkCUuV317OW_PxtuY_ba0tGz3K0c5HNkI69EVJ-ev62MDipH8_WPcAAQJmohzXUEw9-juE2LwObu6CbZvUzP8uwJl5xovNrGQtS_OybaR7UCYGAcM2saAJxNekToOeSGQjTtgv/s320/DeMenil-Residence.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">de Menil residence in River Oaks</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<br />
For more information:
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.carlosjimenezstudio.com/">http://www.carlosjimenezstudio.com/</a><br />
<a href="http://www.menil.org/">http://www.menil.org/</a><br />
<a href="http://www.ricegallery.org/new/exhibition/unwovenlight.html">http://www.ricegallery.org/new/exhibition/unwovenlight.html</a><br />
<a href="http://www.rothkochapel.org/">http://www.rothkochapel.org/</a><br />
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/03/garden/a-house-that-rattled-texas-windows.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm">http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/03/garden/a-house-that-rattled-texas-windows.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm</a>Kenneth Caldwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11877278524477312027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5314334776379149827.post-80422831138417843082013-08-28T10:31:00.000-07:002013-08-28T10:31:58.474-07:00On the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington<b>Still Marching towards Liberation</b><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQhfDnW6OhEb-e9xi1j3XB9pLL8ZWRxB3Buo_4YPD1XGiCP9brx7eQxStsp1s9fD-L-bTdfJRye5QIE0IWItVp4cbiHu2rcrScmRlQswoLiP9mQAFTUtzhhLam0RjUoPMegXuNGZEkcKUn/s1600/Unknown.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQhfDnW6OhEb-e9xi1j3XB9pLL8ZWRxB3Buo_4YPD1XGiCP9brx7eQxStsp1s9fD-L-bTdfJRye5QIE0IWItVp4cbiHu2rcrScmRlQswoLiP9mQAFTUtzhhLam0RjUoPMegXuNGZEkcKUn/s1600/Unknown.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">courtesy Library of Congress</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Today is August 28, the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. Remember, it was called the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” Civil rights cannot be separated from social and economic justice.
<br />
<br />
Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his best-known speech, “I Have A Dream,” a half century ago. The dream and the pursuit continues. King remains one of the greatest Americans who lived in the 20th century. Great because he tried to find a true north to liberate all Americans from the long shadow of the country’s founding—the shadow of slavery, genocide, and yes, capitalism. He understood that the suffering of African Americans was tied to the suffering of poor people everywhere and was directly linked to the workings of our economic engine. This is why he opposed the Vietnam War and was marching with sanitation workers in Memphis when he was killed.
<br />
<br />
Martin Luther King, Jr., tried hard to harbor no ill will toward the rich or even towards loudmouth racists like George Wallace and Lester Maddox. He turned to his deep faith to find the strength to keep marching. I am still moved by his profound courage and leadership. He was a nonviolent radical who looked for love.
<br />
<br />
King believed that the government can work to redistribute the wealth so that all people can have education, healthcare, and shelter, but he was no communist. I mention that because if we are concerned about the recent revelations about governmental intrusion into our privacy, we need look no further than what the U.S. government tried to do to King. J. Edgar Hoover tried to destroy him using extensive surveillance. But he failed. Hoover ended up in the dustbin of history because he did not stand for freedom, but only for power. What a strange twist of fate that an angry, closeted gay man like Hoover couldn’t bring King down, but an out, clever gay man like Bayard Rustin could figure out how to organize King’s incredible march in two months. King stood for all humanity. He is still marching us towards liberation.
Kenneth Caldwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11877278524477312027noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5314334776379149827.post-3504876564290337172013-08-21T13:18:00.000-07:002013-08-21T13:18:47.508-07:00Neutra House Coda<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOwrUKnEWKp2uPR05OJITpNCKLAY2mBPsrg4Z_5jInrBUThQpLV1D4Y8-dEA3nq47DQRLa7F0zG1P5gEOVZd0U-ydE-tBlXooFUv_2a7vA5cEKhgrYuy6-bCAgAI1J1S2bEf8IBqyAMALT/s1600/all-three-cottages-1940.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOwrUKnEWKp2uPR05OJITpNCKLAY2mBPsrg4Z_5jInrBUThQpLV1D4Y8-dEA3nq47DQRLa7F0zG1P5gEOVZd0U-ydE-tBlXooFUv_2a7vA5cEKhgrYuy6-bCAgAI1J1S2bEf8IBqyAMALT/s1600/all-three-cottages-1940.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The three cottages in 1940 Courtesy of the Department of<br />
Special Collections & University Archives,<br />
Stanford University Libraries</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Nearly four years ago, I went to the dedication of a renovated Neutra house in Los Altos and wrote about it.
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://designfaith.blogspot.com/2009/03/too-little-to-save.html">http://designfaith.blogspot.com/2009/03/too-little-to-save.html</a>
<br />
<br />
I interviewed architectural designer Miltiades Mandros, who had been intimately involved in early efforts to save the house. He explained some of the machinations that went on behind the scenes. Knowing that he would later write about the whole episode at great length, I just wrote, “ What happens next gets a little murky.”
<br />
<br />
Well, now Miltiades has laid it out for you. Some might say in excruciating detail. And while he is settling scores, I found it fascinating reading. Not only because I think most politicians are psychologically unstable, but because there are so many strange lessons that I only touched on in my short piece. You can find the Mandros piece at
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.miltiadesmandros.wordpress.com/">www.miltiadesmandros.wordpress.com</a>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5eUJUx3SpoXuvfO9MtWO9JX5vjqeajjAXaHjTaVRdjVzMQOhgFRk8VyHqbfJZbDMl-LJxXkPAmmIig9dw-lkd__lWlFC1rwPWONWcYfQ2kkgtUdUNVelaz98fEUhbZmq5FT09L5aLSaEG/s1600/neutra-house-move-3.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5eUJUx3SpoXuvfO9MtWO9JX5vjqeajjAXaHjTaVRdjVzMQOhgFRk8VyHqbfJZbDMl-LJxXkPAmmIig9dw-lkd__lWlFC1rwPWONWcYfQ2kkgtUdUNVelaz98fEUhbZmq5FT09L5aLSaEG/s1600/neutra-house-move-3.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The cottage is moved, November 2005<br />
Courtesy of John Gusto</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj20lru_iwFhyFbqgMtzBH5F-kWvZrlHk8jH-rkeeG-RcMTHCazLjJTvKKHUdqrtEK9SdJlA7p8H9y-cQJlads_7ZeBmoB802hZHWgNRXa9tO5I5udUktc2cICgXmCw0reErEyAEyVPeFMq/s1600/jacqueline-johnson-cottage-exterior-during-reconstruction-2006.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj20lru_iwFhyFbqgMtzBH5F-kWvZrlHk8jH-rkeeG-RcMTHCazLjJTvKKHUdqrtEK9SdJlA7p8H9y-cQJlads_7ZeBmoB802hZHWgNRXa9tO5I5udUktc2cICgXmCw0reErEyAEyVPeFMq/s320/jacqueline-johnson-cottage-exterior-during-reconstruction-2006.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jacqueline Johnson cottage exterior during reconstruction – 2006,<br />
by Miltiades Mandros</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Some of the lessons are:
<br />
<br />
If someone involved is actually named King Lear, the story is not going to end well.<br />
If someone threatens to sue you from the outset, the story is not going to end well.<br />
If someone tries to use a small-town gay parade for negative political leverage, the story is not going to end well.
<br />
<br />
There were many conclusions about the nature of preserving modernism in suburbia, some of which I discussed in my original post. The only thing I might add now is that one should be very cautious about moving to small affluent suburban communities in the Bay Area. Little stakes, big drama. Like Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf? writ large. But who ever thought a little modernist cottage could cause such havoc?
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLx5ZcTQlAwUx_msxli0T2ryMK6UZewuCIQx44Re5g8D0rsMnIk97AE4GeNfxnlNP5Ki1Rj5VZWITDOHHfecs9UTCdV3lAfZM6_S2Gn56p6K9vJTxPCUqXQFRDauyU_BjXeRq0Wsasiu-S/s1600/restored-house-1.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLx5ZcTQlAwUx_msxli0T2ryMK6UZewuCIQx44Re5g8D0rsMnIk97AE4GeNfxnlNP5Ki1Rj5VZWITDOHHfecs9UTCdV3lAfZM6_S2Gn56p6K9vJTxPCUqXQFRDauyU_BjXeRq0Wsasiu-S/s1600/restored-house-1.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The repurposed Jacqueline Johnson cottage opens – 2008<br />
by Miltiades Mandros</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />Kenneth Caldwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11877278524477312027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5314334776379149827.post-83710493379008830922013-08-07T08:32:00.000-07:002013-08-07T09:23:29.179-07:00Celebrating A. Quincy Jones, FAIA - Part Two<b>A Conversation with Fred Fisher
</b><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCNPSXvSXBi_aO0HAKJbw9262idc_1I8W-EZ6_ARKMZlZzJ1fawQ56luEFJBta60001ih6_Ua8wn7PN67UHDhap22I2lV4ATuA8jeIS8fRwZz_fhBdoPBJ8XTCog4trGxQlwyu2otjAzmm/s1600/fisher-crop.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="308" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCNPSXvSXBi_aO0HAKJbw9262idc_1I8W-EZ6_ARKMZlZzJ1fawQ56luEFJBta60001ih6_Ua8wn7PN67UHDhap22I2lV4ATuA8jeIS8fRwZz_fhBdoPBJ8XTCog4trGxQlwyu2otjAzmm/s320/fisher-crop.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fred Fisher in his office.<br />
Photo: Kenneth Caldwell</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Fred Fisher is well known among the cognoscenti of American architecture. In addition to renovating noted buildings by A. Quincy Jones, he has designed numerous projects for the Annenberg philanthropies and buildings for Cal Tech, Colby College, and Princeton University. With the success of the new Annenberg Visitors Center and the renovation of Sunnylands, the Annenberg estate near Palm Springs, the awareness of his talent will spread even further. In 1995, Fisher purchased the office building that once housed the office of A. Quincy Jones and Fred Emmons from Quincy’s widow, Elaine Jones. For several years, he has been involved in projects relating to Quincy’s work, including several residences of varying scales. A few years ago, we met with Fred in his office on Santa Monica Boulevard to talk about this relationship.
<br />
<br />
<b>Interviewer: I would like to focus on Quincy’s work and your relationship to it. There is your office, where we are seated, and of course there’s Sunnylands, which is the size of a city hall.</b>
<br />
<br />
Fred Fisher: I’m not sure where I read it, but I think in the course of our research, there was a mention that Ambassador Annenberg actually wanted the home designed in a way that it could be converted into a country club.
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<br />
<b>Really? </b>
<br />
<br />
It does have that feeling of a public space. It was conceived for large scale private entertainment.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYeX1DG0tcQdxIzUlFlAR9YCwq8-37paJZeDcZZMs3Mmhkd8bI2_QuycvAjFFyNwF3xooB3kk-rU3pHmvc6VZnoOEl5vJg5PFSfHDpkRAfVvatq7Es0_ml87Bd8AxwSp_RxbN5QWXUcGXX/s1600/10_Sunnylands+Press+Photos_DDL033.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYeX1DG0tcQdxIzUlFlAR9YCwq8-37paJZeDcZZMs3Mmhkd8bI2_QuycvAjFFyNwF3xooB3kk-rU3pHmvc6VZnoOEl5vJg5PFSfHDpkRAfVvatq7Es0_ml87Bd8AxwSp_RxbN5QWXUcGXX/s320/10_Sunnylands+Press+Photos_DDL033.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A view into the atrium of the estate house.
The sculpture in the center<br />
of the atrium is an original casting of Eve, by Auguste Rodin, 1881.<br />
Photo by Graydon Wood. Copyright The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<b>When Elaine had to leave the Barn, there was a lot of concern over what would happen to the building, which has been a kind of cultural center in Los Angeles since the 1960s. Now it’s part of the Annenberg Foundation?</b>
<br />
<br />
The Annenberg Foundation bought it from Elaine, and Wallis Annenberg’s daughter Lauren Bon has her own smaller foundation within the Annenberg Foundation that produces artworks and collaborative pieces that she’s involved with. That entity is the user of the building. It’s called the Chora Council.
<br />
<br />
<b>Can you tell us a little about what she might do there?</b>
<br />
<br />
Lauren Bon is an artist, and she is involved in producing artworks of others. She sees it as an actively used and publicly engaged studio for art production.
<br />
<br />
I think she understands the building as part of the Annenberg legacy, which is inextricably linked to Quincy Jones. There is Sunnylands, the Annenberg School of Communications at USC, and now the Barn. I think she sees the Barn as a collection object, as an acquired object in the collection of the Annenberg Foundation, not as a real estate acquisition.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRYDprJ7sRfJysDgnMxp6jvvIgDO1wv5mHTDFBylfSTkYwknjQXYgvD1FC5kUzHofHTrhnKml9ujpRSOrfwhteloztOkBS_AqUhwKE94oIoRQv0zBmqwqDTDSM6GKCuD7AA4vkunbKINq1/s1600/the-barn.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRYDprJ7sRfJysDgnMxp6jvvIgDO1wv5mHTDFBylfSTkYwknjQXYgvD1FC5kUzHofHTrhnKml9ujpRSOrfwhteloztOkBS_AqUhwKE94oIoRQv0zBmqwqDTDSM6GKCuD7AA4vkunbKINq1/s320/the-barn.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Barn<br />
Photo: Takashige Ikawa courtesy Fred Fisher and Partners.</td></tr>
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<br />
<b>Have you changed much at the Barn? </b>
<br />
<br />
Lauren has been very deliberate about what we call the Hippocratic philosophy of renovation, “first, do no harm.” Basically, we’re just cleaning it up and improving the forty-five year old mechanical and electrical systems. I mean, we’re literally rehabilitating the refrigerator and reusing a range.
<br />
<br />
<b>I know that range had been broken for a long time. Elaine did replace some of those refrigerator units, and they were very hard to get, now impossible.</b>
<br />
<br />
We couldn’t find one that matched it that would fit. So that pushed us in the direction of rehabilitating it.
<br />
<br />
It’s a 45-year old wood building, and it was ready for the care that the Annenberg Foundation is capable of giving. And they’re also capable of owning a piece of property in that location and not ripping it down and using it for the highest and best use. As a house, it only has a couple of parking spaces, which you don’t even want to use, because that’s the courtyard space in the back off the kitchen and studio.
<br />
<br />
<b>Right. She always parked in front. She used that space as the garden. How did you first become aware of Quincy’s work? </b>
<br />
<br />
I met him and visited this office shortly after I graduated from UCLA. I had a cursory meeting with him, like many students did, and then that was the only contact I had with either one of them for a while, until after he passed away. I began to see Elaine and meet her in the art world here.
<br />
<br />
We would see each other at art openings and things like that, and then I got invited to some events at the Barn, and she became a friend. In 1995, I was driving down the street, and I saw the for-sale sign on the office building, and I was shocked that this building would even be on the market. I called Elaine up, and she said that it just came time and that she was going to liquidate the asset.
<br />
<br />
I knew it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and called in all kinds of favors and scraped, begged, borrowed, and would have stolen the money if necessary to put a down payment on it, and crossed my fingers. This was not a good time economically, but it was just something I knew I had to have. I’m very lucky that we were able to work something out that could work for both of us, and so we bought it, and just did a very light refurbishment before we moved in.
<br />
<br />
I continued to see Elaine and talk to her, because we’ve been involved in a few other of Quincy Jones’s houses, including Frances Brody’s house. I am also friends with Cynthia Lasker, Frances’ sister-in-law, who had a house designed by Quincy.
<br />
<br />
<b>Who published that house after you renovated it?</b>
<br />
<br />
<i>Interior Design</i>.
<br />
<br />
<b>The one with the red doors?</b>
<br />
<br />
Rob Maguire, who bought the house at that time, loves the primary colors. We always wondered whether or not Quincy and his partner Fred Emmons had slightly different aesthetics, because Fred’s house in the Palisades is almost like a Marcel Breuer house. The Lasker House was like that too. And yet it had a real formal symmetry to it, which was unlike either one of them. That might have been the influence of Billy Haines. Billy Haines was involved first, as I understand it. The first collaboration with Billy and Quincy was the Brody House. She brought them together, and then they did many more things together, such as the Lasker House and Sunnylands.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8LzEP2VFHr5upsqCV1QkNKs-SAgQF8z4Jr3OgaNxSTyxRrNRw2-8aDczrS5MhwUC9oc0ZiC1qDMeHLkq4mnm1IfRHhBdBcRqeDAng6UX4SmvJWXNN49-x6H2z4CsgQULJ8zCsvVqH3r73/s1600/4_Brody+House.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="247" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8LzEP2VFHr5upsqCV1QkNKs-SAgQF8z4Jr3OgaNxSTyxRrNRw2-8aDczrS5MhwUC9oc0ZiC1qDMeHLkq4mnm1IfRHhBdBcRqeDAng6UX4SmvJWXNN49-x6H2z4CsgQULJ8zCsvVqH3r73/s320/4_Brody+House.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A. Quincy Jones, Sidney F. and Frances Brody House,<br />
Los Angeles, California, 1948-51.<br />
Photograph by Jason Schmidt, 2012. Courtesy Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.</td></tr>
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<br />
<b>What have you come to learn from knowing these buildings so intimately?</b>
<br />
<br />
His work had an informality. The obvious thing was the openness and the organic quality of a lot of the materials, expression of structure, and openness to the outside environment, although he’s not the only one who was doing that.
<br />
<br />
But he was unlike some of the other Case Study House architects, closer to Cliff May, in that he had almost a ranch house domestic vernacular. He employed a strong roof with the low-sloped gable and big overhangs. I live in Crestwood Hills, which he planned with Edgardo Contini and Whitney Smith. I don’t live in a Quincy Jones house, but I moved into that neighborhood before I bought this building, pure coincidence, and I now live and work in environments shaped by Quincy Jones.
<br />
<br />
In Crestwood Hills, the facility with which he and his collaborators fit those houses onto the hillsides and nestled them together kept their privacy and exploited the views; they have a similarity but a variety. It’s a really unique and successful subdivision and a very good example of the best of that era. There’s a kind of warmth and informality that is different than, for example, Gregory Ain’s subdivision in Mar Vista. There is variety there, but less so, and of course, the flat land makes a difference. And then being in this building, Quincy’s office, day after day, year in, year out, it’s had an effect on me. Most significant is the absolute integration of indoor and outdoor space. Here there are the equivalents of horizontal flow to vertical flow.
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiG5V-bmRPIcKB1CuSwNvtZ7SsK2XiR5Hc04xX5Gpuur_2zc0QSTXKqU4qwmjlQUJUxrw0FcQkSv77JRwus8xZzyPblcnGXX29uryIBDpMG3tLoj-V6xwlMKpEUwx17OvB05FeYnAPAzonw/s1600/3_Mutual+Housing+Site+Office.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="247" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiG5V-bmRPIcKB1CuSwNvtZ7SsK2XiR5Hc04xX5Gpuur_2zc0QSTXKqU4qwmjlQUJUxrw0FcQkSv77JRwus8xZzyPblcnGXX29uryIBDpMG3tLoj-V6xwlMKpEUwx17OvB05FeYnAPAzonw/s320/3_Mutual+Housing+Site+Office.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A. Quincy Jones, Whitney Smith, and Edgardo Contini, Architects and Engineer.<br />
Site Office, Mutual Housing Association (Crestwood Hills), Los Angeles, California,
1946-50.<br />
Photograph by Jason Schmidt, 2012. Courtesy Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<b>What do you mean?</b>
<br />
<br />
I like tall spaces. I had a big loft space before, and when I came in here I thought, boy, am I going to get used to this eight-foot ceiling? But I never even think about it anymore, because the visual flow is horizontal, and there is a lot of it. And then the simple gesture, it’s a rectilinear building, and yet there is one property line, this one, which has a slight angle, and that adds a subtle but significant dynamism to the whole composition, and he plays on that very well.
<br />
<br />
I also appreciate what I’ve considered to be the Japanese aspect of it. I’m a great lover of Japanese architecture and gardens, and this has that aspect of the intimate gardens, connected to the indoor space. Look at the informal use of organic materials, like the pebble-seeded concrete.
<br />
<br />
<b>That flows indoors and out.</b>
<br />
<br />
Right. And the use of the wood paneling, exposed structure, and the indoor/outdoor gardens. I think that’s one of the distinguishing factors of West Coast modernism versus East Coast modernism, the awareness and embracing of Japanese architecture.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Frederick Fisher and Partners Architects</td></tr>
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<br />
<b>You can see that in Quincy’s travel sketches. From working on Sunnylands, what else have you gleaned? Of course, that’s an extraordinary project. While the Brody House is large, Sunnylands is baronial.
</b><br />
<br />
Yes, Depending on how many guest wings you figure in, you consider it upwards of 30,000 square feet. It’s hard to exactly know what the program given to him was, and how much was Billy Haines’s thinking, and how much was Walter and Lee Annenberg’s thinking, and how much was Quincy Jones’s thinking. It’s grandiose in a way that none of his other domestic spaces are. The Brody House is sizable, but it’s not grandiose.
<br />
<br />
The spaces in the Brody house are informal in their planning, whereas Sunnylands is very formal and very grand. Perhaps it had to do with how the Annenbergs imagined who they were and what their position was. Remember, they lived in Philadelphia, and this was their winter house, almost like an extended vacation house, but still a place to entertain on a grand scale.
<br />
<br />
President Eisenhower, as I understand it, was the first guest. Unlike Jones’s other projects, the house had an intention of social positioning, especially with the idea of a private golf course. You can’t put a bungalow in the middle of a 200-acre site. And yet they didn’t always entertain on a grand scale. Originally, there were only two guest suites, and then there were three more guest rooms added.
<br />
<br />
I think that the dinners would be at most 24 people, except the famous New Year’s Eve party, where there would be a smaller dinner first and then more people invited for drinks and dancing afterwards.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRmj1yzRdPC5GSF39kJiY1Ld40GUV9iJ0n42-mda-mc7w7QpQVP8-zpnegyxRjgqZ0YTQd3onnTqG84GNVGc7zBIujzuz35iQwEY5PcFFpYuVkhZ5eHnbwIrJ4eCh-ca9LeNgk1gO42QXo/s1600/11_Sunnylands+Press+Photos_g191-1+cc.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRmj1yzRdPC5GSF39kJiY1Ld40GUV9iJ0n42-mda-mc7w7QpQVP8-zpnegyxRjgqZ0YTQd3onnTqG84GNVGc7zBIujzuz35iQwEY5PcFFpYuVkhZ5eHnbwIrJ4eCh-ca9LeNgk1gO42QXo/s320/11_Sunnylands+Press+Photos_g191-1+cc.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The living room of the estate house, which features<br />
many original furniture designs by decorator William Haines.<br />
Photo by Graydon Wood.<br />
Copyright The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<b>Do you feel that Quincy was able to extend the principles that you see in his more modest buildings to that larger scale? </b>
<br />
<br />
Nominally yes, but I think essentially not so much. It’s also a different kind of environment out there in the desert. The Annenbergs didn’t live in it five months of the year, because it’s basically uninhabitable out there when it’s 110°. You played golf outside, and you could eat lunch and get in the pool, but the house didn’t embrace the outside in the same way as a part of everyday life, as an extension of the interior spaces. I think it’s more contained, even though there’s lots of glass, and you can look out. It’s a more introverted house.
<br />
<br />
<b>And more formal?</b>
<br />
<br />
Very much more formal. The main space is very symmetrical. The different wings, the kitchen, dining, and the guest wing, go one way, and the master suite and office area go another way.
<br />
<br />
<b>So now that you’ve looked at so many of his projects and worked on all these buildings, has it changed your architecture?</b>
<br />
<br />
Being in this building has definitely changed my architecture. I’ve always loved California for the connection to Japanese architecture that I mentioned and the Wrightian tradition of use of woods and other organic materials. Being in this building all the time has imbedded some of the ideas we’ve been talking about more essentially than might otherwise be the case, because I live in it. The subtleties of proportions and scale take a while to get into your blood.
<br />
<br />
Even though this is a commercial building, it really has the scale of a house. It’s attuned me more toward a fine-grained scale of his rooms in relationship to outside spaces: the absolute continuity of materials inside to outside and the particular areas of the sizes of the gardens.
<br />
<br />
It wasn’t an epiphany or a whole new way of thinking about architecture, but it was an immersion and increasing understanding and absorption of those kinds of relationships and sensibilities.
<br />
<br />
<b>After looking at a lot of Quincy’s buildings, I would say he seems very focused on the roofline and the experience of the roof visually. Of course, I am not the first to observe this.</b>
<br />
<br />
Yes, the roof was big. And Sunnylands is a perfect example of that. He liked a statement roof. The new visitors center at Sunnylands is meant to have some of the Quincy Jones DNA, and yet it’s not Quincy Jones. But the thick floating roof is a statement, the way that he liked to do those for even the smaller houses. I wanted to be deferential and not compete with the statement pyramidal roof that he had for the estate, which was definitely driven by the client.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">View of the reflecting pools and the rear of the Center,<br />
with the Palo Verde trees in bloom.<br />
Photo by the Office of James Burnett.<br />
Copyright The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8Ib1g-0TmYHM4kr8N8YsTlZZGtpMCXIyjeHfMgIyYW-qS9bZJTA9VPeJ29d6CVrnWY0ipx8I46gry7G0T54zOBtbYMh70_4V1MS0eI4wbOIXU9yXUN4lXIVj4tr29BXt29iC_U3zrlXce/s1600/5_Sunnylands+Press+Photos_2233_edit_v2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="176" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8Ib1g-0TmYHM4kr8N8YsTlZZGtpMCXIyjeHfMgIyYW-qS9bZJTA9VPeJ29d6CVrnWY0ipx8I46gry7G0T54zOBtbYMh70_4V1MS0eI4wbOIXU9yXUN4lXIVj4tr29BXt29iC_U3zrlXce/s320/5_Sunnylands+Press+Photos_2233_edit_v2.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Bust of Diego on Stele III</i>, 1958, by Alberto Giacometti.<br />
This sculpture from the estate house has been<br />
re-installed in the Grand Hall of the new Center.<br />
Photo by Mark Davidson.<br />
Copyright The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<b>Interviewer: While Quincy focused a lot on the roof, he didn’t seem to obsess so much over the elevations. They could be very simple, sometimes even plain. But it was the experience moving through the building that was what mattered. The spatial experience is the thread, not the thing that’s recorded in a photograph that ends up in a magazine. Do you think that’s an accurate assessment? </b>
<br />
<br />
I haven’t thought about it that way, but I think you’re right. The elevations are not in and of themselves seemingly highly studied compositions. It does have more to do with the views from the inside out. He was very sensitive to, and very good at, movement through a building. Again, our office building is a nicely choreographed set of spaces.
<br />
<br />
<b>Perhaps this was his greatest talent, the choreography, and then all of the things that influence that: the lighting, the color of the materials, and so forth. Architectural writers focus so much on the object.
</b><br />
<br />
It’s so intangible. And you have to experience it to understand it, and so there aren’t that many people who have carefully gone through and experienced those things in order to write about it. It’s one of the hardest things to observe and critique and express about architecture. It’s not seen as a significant part of all architecture, and yet it’s an important part of his work and one of his strengths.
<br />
<br />
<b>Do you have other aspects, beyond Quincy’s work, that you want to talk about?</b>
<br />
<br />
As we been having this conversation, I’m reflecting a little bit on how it was a completely unexpected dimension of my career, and yet it’s such an important one. I’m an architect, like most, wanting to do my own work, and I do. And yet this kind of relationship to Quincy Jones has added to it. It has added a fascinating dimension to my practice and a set of fascinating relationships. It is a legacy that I am connected to and feel and obligation to support. I wouldn’t feel that way as much if I didn’t feel empathetic toward his practice, and what he did, and its relevance. I just find it to be one of those surprises and accidents of life that turn out to open up whole new avenues.
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgozweJl3rZWGgpbII7Ep6_2JeCmhek6Qsdayzb4qh3wVBtDd9HaK2LfYw2JJmLG7mn38v4rcfshEFdt0Bx6yezNtQrO9mn_1kA8Hz5whhg4fMUqRU-t4DYjJb4bMv8lKt_Ggo22A8RZ87E/s1600/WSU2413_ForPowerPoint.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgozweJl3rZWGgpbII7Ep6_2JeCmhek6Qsdayzb4qh3wVBtDd9HaK2LfYw2JJmLG7mn38v4rcfshEFdt0Bx6yezNtQrO9mn_1kA8Hz5whhg4fMUqRU-t4DYjJb4bMv8lKt_Ggo22A8RZ87E/s320/WSU2413_ForPowerPoint.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Collaborative design session between FFP Partners and artist Roy McMakin.</td></tr>
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<a href="http://www.fisherpartners.net/">www.fisherpartners.net</a><br />
<a href="http://www.sunnylands.org/">www.sunnylands.org</a><br />
<a href="http://www.annenbergfoundation.org/">http://www.annenbergfoundation.org/</a><br />
<a href="http://archpaper.com/news/articles.asp?id=5970">http://archpaper.com/news/articles.asp?id=5970</a>Kenneth Caldwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11877278524477312027noreply@blogger.com0