Rediscovering the Disney

So yesterday:
I met my studiomate Charles behind IKEA (my new backyard, satellite office, and general lifestyle supplier) to get our water taxi on and cruise to lower Manhattan to see the David Byrne/Creative Time Piece: Playing the Building...? I still don't know the proper title and don't care, but know that I should. The water taxi trip out of the basin and across the river to the Southstreet Seaport was thrilling enough! The water! The sun! The watery bounce of the taxi! We steamed past the brooklyn shipyards, their long-necked cranes, and a containership in port, stacked with containers like cans in a pantry.




We got to the seaport and I realized that in all my years here, I've only been to the seaport once before, and all I remember is being lost and having to pee. Not this time! My liquids were under control and I was seized by the Bermuda-triangleness of it all! The FDR a'crackle just above us, the humming throngs of tourists magnetized towards the seaport, the helicopters taking off and landing at the heliport, like loud bumblebees touching down on the same azalea. Getting our bearings, we noticed that Wall Street really is wall-y -- the buildings rise up immediately into a dizzying maze, and that no one really seems to know where they're going. Besides perhaps the homeless dudes asleep the the nice little outdoor park for whom I would guess that is home and they know where they are. There were so many people on bikes -- which I normally only associate with the West Side -- the times I've run on the east side, it was just me and some lunchtime smokers. How times have changed. The streets do something weird that not even New York plated cars seemed to comprehend, and so the bikes -- many of which were piloted by tourists, and therefore doubly confused -- and us pedestrians and drivers were all just trying to scurry in a general direction. And all of those directions were different. Forget traffic laws and normal behavior patterns. I loved it.

And I liked the David Byrne piece -- the building is pitch perfect: elegant and crumbling, well-lit but still dingy. But the piece itself just made the space sound like the world's loudest radiator at the beginning of winter. Ah well. If only Mr. Byrne had given Janet Cardiff a call and they'd had a drink or two. The piece might have been really dazzling.

gorgeous, right?

David Byrne doppleganger and public art enthusaist

On our way back to the water taxi, Charles wondered aloud when we might be able to start enjoying Govenor's Island just as paused in front of the building labeled GOVENORS ISLAND FERRY. We looked out to find a boat in the slip and so, unexpectedly, we took a spin to Govenor's Island. Not as prepared as everyone else around us with bikes, picnic trolleys, sunbrellas, and complete napping set-ups, we disembarked on the island, took a walk and set down for a spell. It's going to be great there, but don't tell anyone. Let's just keep it our secret magical place, ok??

As we were waiting for the ferry back to the water taxi, we were talking about how the past two hours were unlike any two hours we could remember having past our first couple years in the city. What I mean is that moving to New York is like moving to the best amusement park for creative people one could ever imagine -- performances by all our heros, shows by all our favorites, unexpectedly crazily inspiring happenings like large furry mascots wrestling on the street, all stacked up and spread out over the city every day of the week and every night...well, it just gets to be too much. And so do our rents, so we start working all the time to pay for our rents and fund our dreams...and so we forget about all the wondrous stuff outside our offices and apartments. We have to, otherwise we'd go crazy having to miss out on so much all the time.

And well, a lot of us -- me in particular -- find the grind after awhile boring. And we try to get out. Or maybe we do get out -- for awhile. And maybe then we find ourselves back for one reason or another, and we decide that It's Time To Start Loving The City Again. And yesterday was perfect for that. The water rides, the waterfalls, disappointingly thin and 'So Six Flags' according to Charles, but falling as they are for a short amount of time, it was wonderfully Disneyesque. If you can imagine all that candy-colored fibreglass pulled back, this is what it might look like, and but it would still be fun. Way more fun. Because it's New York, too.


I'm sure I'll end up editing this down in a few days, but I just want to get it down and out. So for those of you who may be reading this disclaimer, this entry may make more sense in a few days. Read again if you can.

Everything and Nothing at all

That's the inner A to the inner Q when I wonder just what I've been spending the past 5 months doing, if not, of course, blogging. Or, better yet, what has been occupying my time so very much that I can't type a word in edgewise??? Everything and nothing at all. But here I am today, a blazing Sunday in July, finally ready to answer the question and bring us all -- me including -- back up to date.
Let's work forward to back, shall we? It might just create a virtual mobius of time in my personal blogosphere.

Right now: I'm goose-bumpy from the A/C here in BAKED. It's my new neighborhood wifi cafe, and it has big over-shellacked timbery tables and squishy vinyl-pillowed benches, and somehow it's easier here to think than anywhere else in my life currently. Maybe it's all the wood; or the brown and orange color scheme which simultaneously makes me think of the words 'Halloween Brownie'. Maybe it's the general mellowness of the place. Maybe it's the strange selection of free buttons at the cash register that proclaim 'I DO NOT BENCH PRESS'. Maybe it's the most delicious lemon-poppyseed muffin chaser to my egg sandwhich this morning. I loathe and love this place already in very equal parts: a little over-self-consciously designed, even for a designer; full of parents and impossibly cute children (park slope, stop following me already!), overpriced baked goods and coffee, teapots and tshirts for sale; free wifi, great coffee, decent staff and interesting non-parenting sorts... But I will always remember it as the first lunch here in my new neighborhood with Mvisiting UT Arch pal, Ms. Emily Scarfe.

We'll get to the new neighborhood part in a moment, but first, there's yesterday to get to. I've named it Rediscovering the Disney...

The Great Escape

So I’m back in Brooklyn, as of 2pm yesterday.
It’s been weeks since the last check-in, but between fleeing Holland on the 90th day to preserve my good immigration record, and all that entailed – all-nighters of glazing and documentation, mornings of cleaning and packing – it’s been hard to do much but Manage The Situation.

On the heels of the Not-So-Great Escape, I took a week of decompression in Glasgow. Many thanks -- well-beyond words -- to my friend Alistair McAuley and his family for taking me in for the week and absorbing me into their lives. Eve volunteered her explosively pink bedroom, Jack volunteered rounds on his Super Mario game DS and suffered my total and complete lack of skills. Denise was just a fantastic companion, and I’m not sure how she manages her work and family as effortlessly as she does, but I’d like to take some pages out of her book one day. And Ali, super commander, ear-blinking, Land Rovering, was the most wonderful of friends, tour guides and overall good-humored pals setting me up not only at home but in his studio to do, well, whatever.

When he offered two years ago an invitation to Glasgow, ‘come and drink some whiskey and we’ll straighten you out, ‘ I don’t think either of us knew what that would eventually mean. But after a trip to Birmingham and back in a day to the worlds’ largest convention center, and then a day’s preparation for Burns’ night dinner, a night’s partying, and another day’s recovery, I can’t say I’ve ever laughed as much or really relaxed quite so much amidst such great company. Or been quite so hungover. Ouch, that was a good night. If you’ve never been to a Burns’ night, please accept the first possible invitation.

So here are some photos from Burns' Night -- there are a couple others here and there of the rest of the trip, but these say it best:

1. The day is going to be a good one when it starts with silkscreening the table cloth.
The 'Beasties have been holding Burns' night at their printshop every year because their print table is 2 m x 20 m for printing wall paper and fabric.
That's Ali in the foreground presiding over things.

2. Shopping for 90: this is one of two carts.
Note the ominous balls of veggie haggis on the right and the 18 packets of Irish shortbread on the left.
They are covering up 24 large turnips and 12 4 lb bags of potatoes. Aye!

3. To the butcher's for the meat haggis.

Made to order, these three lovelies should feed at least 60.
You don't want to know what they smell like cooking.
Or what it looks like afterward.

4. Addressing the Haggis.
That's conceptual artist Roddy Buchanan on the left and a wine merchant named Ross on the right.
Roddy is about to recite a bit written by Burns lauding the Haggis and then he'll stab it with the Scottish version of a ninja sword.
Then the dinner can start.

5. Dinner for 90. Everyone's seated, eating and fairly drunk.
Halfway through dinner, the performances start.
People have come with poems, songs -- and in once special case -- an impersenation of a large truck -- to perform.

6. My dinner. I missed the meat Haggis, so veggie it was, and you know what?
It was pretty yummy. I missed out on the turnips which I hear really makes the meal.

6. At the end of the performances -- which went on for a couple of hours -- everyone stands and links arms like we did in girl scouts I think,
to sing Auld Lang Syne (sp?) -- actually recorded and popularized by Burns.
That's Denise, Ali's wife, on the left and Ali on the right, singing as loudly and fiercely as the rest of the crowd.

7. And then the whiskey takes center stage.
Needless to say, there was alot of whiskey and a lot of drinking it.
That's me, Ali and his close-talking friend Sven, who apparently designs sneakers for Nike.
We carried on till 6 in the morning. I lost my wrap.

Then Saturday came. There are no pictures of Saturday because I couldn't sit up for more than 10 minutes without feeling queasy.
Then Sunday came.

The aftermath. May not look as bad as it was here in the photo, but that's because you can't smell anything.

Last licks of cleaning go to the smallest, Eve, Ali's 6-yr-old.
I'd love to say that it's part of the Burns' night tradition -- akin to Passover, but really it's because she loves the vaccuum cleaner and because she's small enough to walk the print table without breaking it.

The Church Bells

6:44am and raining. Very dark out. Stays dark until 8:30 or 9 depending on the weather.
Should be suiting up for the run to the zwemen pool.
But I'm here with some hot chocolate instead.

So the firing went mostly ok.
The second batch is in.
The lace pieces are all dipped, with varying degrees of success and drying.
The immigration did not fare quite as well as all else. I have to leave asap and won't be able to return for 6 months.
Wonderful stuff. Lesson learned. Will do much more diligence before my next residency, or any other attempt to live abroad. Or, I'll have the section of my brain that follows rules and worries about breaking them removed and enjoy the bliss.

Couldn't spend the day dwelling on it though because I had to cook dinner for 14 people. It was a rather New York afternoon. Wind blasting out from unexpected corners, and alot of mileage -- kilometerage? -- with an overly heavy pack. Although I can't say I could ever imagine myself carring 3 jumbo cans of peaches and 2 bottles of wine, scallions, basmati, butter, eggs, honey (jarred) in search of fresh chickens. But no one knows what the future will bring. Me most of all.

Couldn't have imagined that not dealing all day long -- and maybe an unecessary extra glass of Albert Hein's finest bottle of 'Espana' would end me up -- wide awake at 2:30 and listening to the church bells for every hour thereafter. In between sorting through everything cycling through my brain -- all the work that needs to be done and seems farther away with every day, just how I'm going to get out of here with my ginormous suitcase and it's little friend, and just what route that now may take -- I wondered why the cathedral has the bells ring all night long. I never noticed them after midnight before. Not that I'm normally up to listen for them of course. But it's interesting all the same. Maybe they ring all night to keep time for the one bird on the canal that happily sings all night long. Who's to say?

It's Gettin' Dark in Herre

So no picture show tonight as promised, but a moment to note nonetheless.
Shit meets fan tomorrow.

I will find out if my piece survived the kiln. There is mixed optimism amongst the staff. My blustering American brand of optimism has taken a temporary dip after a conversation with one of my favorite staff members. I owe the dip to my high levels of trust in his experience (despite his particularly steely brand of Dutch pragmatism that translates into a general level of negative expectations of the world) and even higher levels of fatigue.

It would be interesting to see if anyone out there has studied levels of whatever chemicals in your body send *tired* signals to the brain. Besides a clear correlation between sleeping hours vs. waking hours and the quality/content of each, every time I have to do something particularly stressful here, like stacking work on kilnshelves for firing (monday) or making these large crocheted pieces (finally! today!) it is extra exhausting. Like a power surge to every part of me which blows a few circuits. All the Europeans here emphatically tell me I'm Doing Too Much. I think you all would think nothing of my days here, really. A little exercise, 8-12 hours in the studio. None of it *feels* like too much.

Have I lost perspective?

Ok, maybe it has been a little too much these past 5 days , but I only have a week left to make everything I want to make. Stress levels are reaching peak levels, as has been expected. But I specifically took last night off and watched an episode of The Wire (thanks Jess!) and two episodes of The Office (Thanks Claypies!) -- in order to be in good form today. And today needed to be a good 14-16 hour powerhouse. We're only coming up on 10 hours (and I took one of those for a run) and I'm cooked. Again, I'll remind you that I only have one week left to finish everything.

But in addition to the incredible uncertainty of the kiln outcome, I also just found out that I may have to leave the country directly once I finish. No lecture to Basel (sorry, Reto!), no week in Berlin (sorry Stephanie, Georg, Ben, Jeremy, Merrill!), no week of meetings in Amsterdam+ Rotterdam (sorry future!) or last couple days in London (sorry Armstrongs!) See you all in 6 months during HIGH SEASON. Yeah right.

So yes, it is dark both outside and in at the moment. I suppose I am putting this all down for you, me and everyone because I still have hope that the little bit of sunlight we get here brings the best possible of outcomes for such uncertainties. Or the very least, that dinner will be tasty, the next episode of the Wire riveting, and sleep arriving shortly thereafter and staying as long as it needs to so that I'm able to relocate my good humor and blustery optimism tomorrow.

In the meantime, know any good jokes?

Missing Person's Report

So with exactly 1 month, minus 3 days left here, the kettle of fish is heating up.
I have been on my feet glazing the slabs for 26 of the past 48 hours. I know that's probably meaningless, so the translation is
I have been standing on a hard cement floor pushing and pulling 50 pound things, painting them vigourously, and totally stressing out for 26 of the past 48 hours.
I made it through songs (alphabetically) A-G on my ipod yesterday: 96 of 396. I highly recommend the alphabetical option now and then. The juxtapositions are fantastic. There should be a for example here but I can't think of one.
I got back to my room around 1:30 this morning and in an attempt to be kind to myself did 30 minutes of yoga.
Everyone told me here that starting my last month it would be impossible to sleep, and they are right.
Couldn't sleep until 3.

But enough stats of suffering. Happy New Year to everyone.
Tell me what you did for New Years.
I hope it was something that barely acknowledged the evening. Those are the best kind, and anything attempting more inevitably fails miserably. New Years is a holiday that should be left for everyone to decide on his or her own time, instead of a false blow-up on the heels of Christmas. As for me, I went to London and rung in the new year with a fine apartmentful of strangers. Lovely strangers. Fun-loving strangers, all with fantastic accents. And I can't lie, I love a good British, Scottish or Irish accent.
But there were no noise makers or funny hats. Well, 3 funny hats, but not on me.
Better than the party even was New Years' day, the opening salvo of which was a trip to Richmond Park. Imagine Central Park as absolute wilderness, with a herd of deer milling about. In 2 minutes the city was a faint memory, and I was trying to enjoy slogging through grassy fields with (gasp) no paved paths or even matted soil ones, decorated every two steps with deer poop. In 4 minutes, I was loving it. And so, the metaphor for this coming year showed itself as I took off at a slow trot: running through a muddy field with no paths, landmarks or directions. I'll keep it in the back of my head at least.


Anyhow, there's lots to tell -- seeing as my last post was 3 weeks ago. And I think weeks here are dog years, or something like it.
As Lucy said, and Lucy was there in London, across the table from me and my plateful of bacon and butter-slathered bread:
My God, You've Got to Blog About All This!
Of course Lucy, you're my blogging angel, and the reason I hopped back on the horse this evening.
She was looking at my photos from the past 3 weeks in the workshop and she's right, there's alot to show.

But not now.
That would mean editing and resizing a bunch of stuff, and well, there's yoga to be done, and hopes of sleeping before 3 am to manage.

Next entry will be a slideshow of ceramic acrobatics, as best as I've learnt them, and a loose narrative trying to make sense of them for you.

Until then, tell me what you did for new years. Or what you hope 2008 brings your way. You don't believe me but really, I'm curious.

The Halfway Mark, for Reals

Tomorrow is my 6-week or half-term review. It’s nearly impossible to believe that so much time has passed. Thanksgiving has gone by, and Christmas is in two weeks, and the desolate lonliness has been replaced by frantic production and deep-seated worry that amidst the labor, there’s something I’m missing conceptually.

There comes a time in every creative project to turn off the ideas, the intellectual refinement, and even the prototyping, and turn on the muscle, so to speak. That moment has never been clearer than in my experiences here. Two weeks ago, a conversation with one of the staff members about why one of my castings was cracking (is it the clay? Does it need to have paper pulp or molochite to hold together better? Is it me? Is my barely-developed technique still a little too flawed?) I mentioned another project I had just sketched out.

Oh yeah? Lemme see it.
M’kay – let’s move to the computer.

I showed him this:
Which was a study of different conceptual systems for transforming bollards into street furniture: prosthesis, wubby-organic shapes, and finally gamescapes. And in 30 minutes, a clay body and mixing receipe for – yup – paper pulp and molochite (the fibrous pulp binds the clay together better, and the molochite controls shrinkage so I’m told) had been designated as had been a rough work plan outlining the 23 initial steps to address before even touching the clay. This list included simple things like ‘get drying rack in studio’ and not-so-simple things like ‘learn how to mix clay’ and 'make patterns that calculate for shrinkage'. And before I knew it, I had started my final project.

Big thanks to Marina for her tough love and insistence that I go back to the site I’d chosen and study it more and make more drawings before she could thoughtfully comment.
I can’t, I have to start making things tomorrow.
Take a day, and make more drawings. You’ll be happier that you did.
Of course I was too overwhelmed the next day to go near the clay. The list was exhausting. So I went and took more pictures and sat the ideas in situ:

And thus, a MicroparkTM was born for the mean streets of Den Bosch. I also have to say thanks to Georg and Stephanie – Stephanie’s another resident here, and Georg, her boyfriend – who are both architects and coincidentally enough teaching a class at the University in Aachen using video games to develop architectural strategies. They were a willing set of critics, who, after looking through
my series of rhino models, lego studies, topographic drawings, and brick pile, kindly said

Why are you trying to build so much?

I had been considering a system of ceramic blocks that could be added to any pile of bricks to make well, a more artful pile of bricks for sitting. The idea hadn’t been settling well for a week, although I liked the idea of a system leveraging castoffs. Georg continued: You didn’t invent Ice Cream or Karaoke, why are you trying to invent all these big things? Why don’t you look for places that already exist in the city for intervention?

Of course.
Iinstead of creating brand-new terrorist-barrier systems – at least fresh out of the gate – and habitable ones at that (for an inspiring example, though, go to Rogers-Marvel NoGos) – how about trying to transform an existing ‘security environment’ into a social environment? I know that even this much information is too much, but stay with me, and know that I’m having a hard time keeping up, too.

This is getting long again, so I’ll skip ahead to the current sketches I’m working with:




I’ll also say that now that I have an idea of the work involved (and money, too: yipes!) I will most likely only be able to make one cluster of the park in clay over the next 6 weeks. The bottom piece of each large hill measures about 90 cm x 40 cm x 3.5 cm, and each hill requires 20 pieces. I can make 9 pieces at a time now – which take about 3 hours of clay mixing, 6 hours of clay pounding to fashion it into large slabs, which like cookie dough can then be cut into elliptical rings in 5 hours. Allowing 2 days of drying time after pounding and then cutting before moving, that brings us to approximately 5-6 days for each 9 pieces. To make the 30 -35 pieces necessary for a large hill, small hill, flower and cloud, we’re looking at 2-3 weeks’ production time. All those pieces then need another 2-3 weeks to dry before firing which will take upwards of 2-3 days in the kiln, and blammo, it’s time for me to leave.

There’s a chance, then, that the resulting group will be too wimpy for the busstop. On drying days, I plan to go scout for other, smaller, bollard groupings that might be suitable for the hills. There’s a cluster near the drawbridges – yeah, there are a long string of them along the canal and they’re in heavy use during the week. So might be a nice place for a perch. We’ll see.

In addition to the parkscape, I’m planning to make smaller ‘narrative objects’ to activate a large radius of space and begin to give information about the world from which the landscape pieces come. What does that mean, Nancy? Could you speak English? What that means is that I’m thinking about the elements of danger (obstacles) and power (energy to fight the obstacles) in video games (space aliens, ghosts, tanks, dudes with guns; and power: cherries, pretzels, power pills, magic tools, secret doorways, buried treasure) and those elements in our own lives – strangely, they’re not too different: terrorists, presidents, natural disaster, war vs. family, love, chocolate, protein shakes, good books, etc etc – and how they might be represented in game language. I imagine the microparkscape becoming a moment of repose in the fantasy version of our own lives. After all, isn’t that what we’re all a little bit looking for? A place that’s not too terribly different, but feels a little safer, a little bit slower, a little bit magical? Or is that just me?


Oh and did I forget to mention that in a head-nod towards developing a series of studies for microparks composed of lace hillsides? Another story for another time as they say, but I will show this first study:
Anyhow -- that's where we are. Glass empty and half-full all at once.