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.

Going Walkabout

Between having to shop and cook dinner for everyone last night and being at a bit of a cross-roads workwise, I ended up walking most of yesterday away. Thought you'd like to see a bit of Den Bosch:

Here's the very edge of the polder and part of what I think is one of the old city motes. Mote in foreground; polder stretches way into the distance. It's 3:30, but it feels like 5 or 6. Behind me is the city, 4 lanes of traffic (albeit miniature traffic by US standards) -- but you'd never know it once you walk down into its fields. It's about 20 feet below street level. Who knows how many feet below *sea* level it is.

Crossed back into town and Whoop! There he is . There's at least one in every shop window if not 6-8. I would have catalogued them all for you, but to be honest, most of them are really dopey looking.Here's Verghtustraate -- it's one of the longest shopping streets in the city, making quite a sweeping arc. Looks like a ghosttown because 90% of shops are closed on Monday. And if they're not, they don't open until 1.

This particular building shook me out of my Medieval boredom -- there's so much of this everywhere I keep forgetting that it's not *everywhere*. I wish I could have snapped the photo with myself at the front door for scale. It's tiiiiiiny. I'm sure the front door is not even a foot taller than me. Feel sorry for the increasingly large Dutchmen and women who probably bang their heads on these sorts of squat places all the time.
No I don't.

And of course.It's true. They're everywhere. Gnomes. Mushrooms. Gnomes and mushrooms. These ones clearly are about to have a melt-down. Brrrrrrrmmmmm-ching. Have a little red wine with your dinner, folks.

All for now. The clay calls. Hope this Tuesday is treating you well.

Happy Black Friday

I'd forgotten about Black Friday until those words jumped out of the Volkskrant (the Dutch paper) yesterday morning, in what I could only guess was an article about the US economy. I'm still in far more support of doing *nothing* the day after Thanksgiving, besides watching movies in bed (in the morning!) maybe taking a walk,or doing some yoga.

So how was your Thanksgiving?
Here, it was a day like any other here for the most part -- although there were ripples through the staff and non-Americans (everyone but me, that is) about it maybe being an important American holiday. It was a day of plaster and molds and then trying to explain the meaning of Thanksgiving to everyone over coffee and later, dinner. Its an explaination that gets very absurd quickly. I haven't had to explain Thanksgiving to anyone as an adult and, well, try it yourself. Just think through it as though you're trying to talk to foreigners. Maybe it goes something like this: It's a celebration of when the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth rock and the Indians (clearly good with crowds) threw a big dinner party in their honor.: a celebration of new friends and the abundance of the fall harvest. It then ends with, 'and then the dinner guests took their land and gave them diseases and killed most of them.'

Props to Tracey Whose-last-name-I-don't-know (I don't know anyone's last name here -- it's kind of like a treatment center or witness protection program in that way), Jeremy's girlfriend from Providence who is visiting this week: she came armed with cookbooks and her own apron to make us all a proper Thanksgiving. They rode around for a good part of the day and found several Grouse for sale but no Turkeys. Grouse are described as 'Wild Chickens Who Live In the Mountains' by one of the staff members -- although how can that be? There are no mountains here. 'But there are big mountains, 300 meters high!' says Jakob, one of the Dutch residents. I suppose perspective is everything, and when you're starting below sea level, well, ok.
Anyhow, it was a swell piece of home, and made me think of everyone and everything for whom I am thankful, including you.

Speaking of explaining cultural differences, this just came in from John Keith, and maybe you know it, maybe you don't. But it's a far better explanation of Christmas here than I could ever muster. Thanks John, and thanks David. So to start your Christmas season, whatever that might mean:

http://people.cornell.edu/pages/bs16/Christmas/6_to_8_black_men.txt