Charley Harper!
February 26, 2010
February 10, 2010
January 08, 2010
November 22, 2009
October 13, 2009
September 20, 2009
Wine Review No. 1
On Thursday I drank (and ADORED) this lovely old Alsatian riesling:
Something about it was much like the air in the living room of an elderly woman who has taken great care of her upholstery and has recently polished her old, dark, wooden piano. A sort of clean, slightly perfumed, sweet (but not at all too sweet) mustiness propelled me into someone's very private, particularly constructed (and very much lived-in) space.
September 19, 2009
Beautiful Thing No. 13
Coral being grown at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida.
August 14, 2009
Beautiful Thing No. 12
Three works by sculptor Ah Xian.
August 05, 2009
Hyperbolic Reefs and an Aversion to Craft
This ongoing hyperbolic crochet project is lovely, quaint, strange, and good. Crocheting a hyperbolic plane results in figures that closely resemble coral and other marine creatures and these people are making a reef. The crochet reef reflects the natural hyperbolic geometry in the anatomies of these underwater creatures. The crochet reef people say:
There are very good reasons why marine organisms take on hyperbolic forms: this geometry is a marvellous way to maximize surface area in a limited volume, thereby providing greater opportunity for filter feeding by stationary organisms. Throughout the organic realm, nature has found ways to utilize hyperbolic forms. Such structures are realized not only in the marine world, but also in cactuses, succulents, and fungi. The double-sided hyperbolic plane is specifically found in certain kinds of seed pods - the large surface area enables the seed to float on the wind and carry for long distances. Many green leafy vegetables such as lettuces and kales also embody hyperbolic geometry, so you often eat hyperbolic forms for lunch.
My love of this reef is uncharacteristic. I confess to generally having quite a craft phobia. I don't have an aversion to the practice of it. In fact, I'm very much in favour of its practice; there's something immensely satisfying about making something that can be used. It's possible that the process of starting with a ball of wool and ending up with something that protects you from the cold is the key to human happiness etc etc. But I do find deeply horrifying the idea of someone's eccentric knitted blobs being sold or displayed.
There is an Australian woman named Jenny Kee who inflicted the most horrible knitted creations on the public for a numbers of years and was somehow lauded as an 'artist'. My grudge against this woman is due not only to my dislike of her designs, but also to her habit of occasionally running off to sit around with people in remote indigenous communities to teach them her art. Yuck, yuck, yuck. This was no doubt done in kind spirit, a rare attempt by a non-indigenous Australian to connect with an indigenous community. But this sends me cringing into violent facial spasms. Firstly, it presumes they wanted to be connected with, but secondly and more horrifyingly, indigenous Australian communities have proven to have possessed for a very long time some rather expert artists of their own, so I'm not sure what it was they were going to learn from a woman whose greatest creative efforts coughed up the fine item linked above.
Also worth noting: Kee can't help but reveal at every available opportunity that she once fucked John Lennon, which is undeniably a very hot thing to have done*, but I do suspect that she keeps mentioning it because fucking John Lennon might very tenuously have something to do with art, whereas the art-koala jumpers link is not so clear.
Anyway, largely because of this Kee, I have a terrible craft phobia. John Dewey's advocacy of a return to craft (although I'm not sure he calls it that), to useful art that fulfills a need, to art that describes and contributes to those parts of our individual existences that are shared, and his complementary rejection of more autobiographical art, or art for art's sake, is very seductive and I wish I could go the whole distance with him. In many ways I agree with Dewey. I think he and I would agree that staring at Tracey Emin's bed, for example, is a complete waste of time and energy. Perhaps he could also be persuaded that despite being useful and warm and made in the home etc, Jenny Kee's koala jumpers are also not worth our time. I think Dewey and I would end up in heated debate (he would of course be calm, I would be the heated bit) about certain musical objects that I would readily put in the Keep pile; I expect he'd want to chuck a few of them. I think we might argue over Matthew Barney too.
*I have always thought of John Lennon as an arseless and boringly pungent (incense not sweat) sort of man, so it's debatable how hot the whole thing would have been. There's a guy (whose name I will dig up) who believes (in a not completely watertight way, so says my impression) that artistic skill is tied up in human sexual selection, but I don't think events of the Kee-Lennon kind are driven by a desire to actually reproduce. And unless you are hoping to reproduce with someone right there and then, then shouldn't you choose based on how likely it seems that they will be fun in bed (do they have an arse? what is their olfactory contribution to the event likely to be, incense, sweat, cloying perfume? etc), rather than choosing based on evidence that they write excellent songs?
July 18, 2009
Lovely Lines
Ramon y Cajal's drawing of a chick cerebellum
One of Zola's Rougon-Macquart family trees
One of Ernst Haeckl's trees
