My Daemon

daemon

Carsten Höller "Hippopotamus" (2007)
pink bi-resin, horn, blue glass eyesc. 90 x 55 x 30 cmedition 5 + 2 a.p.

Xanny's straight up dream

Xanny's Dream Car

http://www.foundshit.com/tag/de-witte/

Rejected!

Kara Maria is a Bay Area artist who I've run into somewhere in the past...maybe a newspaper article, I can't remember. (She's also married to Enrique Chagoya, himself an artist and professor at the greatest university in the world). As is evident in her work, she deals with explicitly political themes while also addressing color and abstraction. Her mixture of smudged background aesthetics and still-shot black and white portraits of politicians remind me of Robert Rauschenberg, perhaps my favorite artist of all time. Maria is working with contemporary public figures, much like Rauschenberg was 50 years ago, but somehow she still manages to evoke a sense of tragic nostalgia with her figures akin to what Rauschenberg did with JFK and others. Her use of color is not just rich and pleasant but also witty in the context of the portraits they accompany (I love the bright pink of the bulldog mama Palin, the crying purple (heart) of McCain, and the jungle colors/black hand hanging behind Obama). But most of all, I appreciate her inclusion of Barack Obama in the rejection portraits. I love the man, we all do, and perhaps that's a problem. I was intrigued to see a iconic rendering of him that replaced the "hope" or "change" tag-line with something more vulnerable, more human.

Rejection 7 (John McCain)
Rejection 9 (Barack Obama)

Rejection 4 (Sarah Palin)

Dins for tonight + a song it inspires

Initial questions: Can you make lamp chunks into lamb lollipops? And what is this Green Goddess Mint Sauce I'm assumed to have...?

1 tablespoon chopped garlic
1 tablespoon chopped fresh peeled ginger
1/4 cup low-sodium soy sauce
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus extra for pan
2 tablespoons cracked black pepper
24 lamb chops, frenched and completely trimmed
3 sprigs fresh rosemary

1) In a medium bowl, whisk together garlic, ginger, soy sauce, 1/4 cup oil, and pepper. Place lamb chops in a large shallow baking dish and pour over garlic mixture. Cover and let marinate, refrigerated, overnight.

2) Preheat grill or a grill pan over medium high heat. Remove lamb chops from marinade, wiping off any excess and place on grill. Season with salt and pepper, and grill, rotating lamb chops 1/2 turn after 1 minute, and continue grilling until cross-hatch marks form, about 1 minute more. Turn lamb chops and repeat process on opposite side. Transfer chops to a warm plate and let stand 3 to 5 minutes before serving with dipping sauce.

a video: http://www.marthastewart.com/recipe/lamb-lollipops-with-green-goddess-mint-dipping-sauce-and-roasted-potatoes?autonomy_kw=lamb&rsc=header_10

AHA: Green Goddess:

This classic dip is made green by pureed parsley, onions and chives – add more or less to suit your taste. The anchovies are optional, but add a flavour reminiscent of Caesar dressing.

1/4 cup white wine or white balsamic vinegar
1/2-1 cup chopped fresh parsley (stems removed)
3 green onions, chopped
small bunch of fresh chives, chopped
1 tsp. – 1 Tbsp. anchovy paste (optional)
1-2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 Tbsp. lemon juice (or to taste)
1/4 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
1 cup low fat mayonnaise

Puree everything in the blender until smooth and refrigerate until ready to serve. Makes about 2 cups.

And now for a song inspired by these scrumptious Lamb Lollies. I had the most delish lamp lollipops of mi vida at an indian restaurant called Mantra in Palo Alto, so I thought I'd select an bollywood song. Immediately the theme song "Chak de India!" from the movie of the same name began to loop into my mind. Perhaps this is because my knowledge of the bollywood music genre is just extremely narrow, or perhaps its because my memories of this film and its music are so damn fuzzy, I dunno. Without futher adieu:

Chak de India

Architecture NOW

I know nothing about the ins and outs of architecture, but lord I love to look at trendy new buildings. These came in an email from ArchDaily to my SFMOMA address. Check em out!

Carl Hampson and Eunike Design recently designed the Pitch House for Belmont, Massachusetts. The home is the reinterpretation for the ideals of early European modernism as it “evolves the universal machine for living concept into a site-specific contemporary dwelling shaped by the local forces of climate, culture, and sustainability” (sounds like some deep stuff!). The main living spaces sit under a pivoting roof that responds to the changing seasons by providing the correct amount of sunlight and shade to the interior throughout the year.

The constantly changing roof “provides a centerpiece for year round outdoor activities.” An open ended site strategy responds “to the transformation of suburban ideals facilitated by the influx of information technology” while the home’s orientation, active and passive solar strategies, thermal mass, and earthen berms collectively reduce year round energy loads.

http://www.archdaily.com/30358/pitch-house-carl-hampson/

Salburúa Nature Interpretation Centre - Vitoria, Spain

An astonishing place: a natural wetlands area close to city, formerly drained to transform them into a farmland, which were returned to their original condition during the last years. An intense “wood-smell”: as element of mediation with nature and the perfect material to take advantage of time (”the older the better”), wood arose from the very first moment as a desire

The will to project the building beyond its limits, flying over the water, to put the visitors in a privileged place: just inside the park, once forgotten the city at their backs, over the water, in a point at which you could not arrive otherwise: a twenty one meters span cantilever made of wood and steel.

http://www.archdaily.com/30399/salburua-nature-interpretation-centre-qve-arquitectos/#more-30399

This is Visiondivison's entry for the Koivusaari Idea Competition to create a new city district on an island just outside Helsinki, Finland. The competition asked participants to organize a master plan for the island that would provide the framework for further planning. Visiondivison’s proposal, Urban Fade, is comprised of a highly efficient city grid that allows users the option of moving around the district to interact with the different areas.

“In Koivusaari, you will experience a great urban diversity on a relatively small island; a dense city core that gradually fades to smaller premises and that eventually becomes archipelago. The island becomes a distillation of the best qualities that each one of the urban typologies has to offer,” explained the architects. The proposal divides the city into separate areas: a city center, medium sized town, small town and then the archipelago. These areas create a densely programmed layout where “the distances between the new districts is kept short …to get a lively city area. This is good for both the environment and from an economical point of view.” The “intense city center” is filled with office, retail and service spaces in close vicinity to transportation lines; green areas surround the “medium sized town” that houses restaurants and residential units; the “small town” area is situated in a park condition; and the archipelago is dominated with public spaces such as piers and pavilions.

http://www.archdaily.com/30350/urban-fade-visiondivision/

In the Netherlands over 50 spots are marked on the map as starting points for recreational use of the rural landscape. People are encouraged to park their cars at these locations instead of at other, more preserved, areas. From here they can explore nature by foot, mountain bike, horse etc. In the small town Reusel, the nomination motivated a local sports merchant to found an outdoor sports park.

A tower, 25 meters high, with sport facilities like climbing and abseiling is the main attraction. It consists of six cubes, hanging on a core of steel columns. Straight flight staircases raise in between and cross the cubes several times in different positions. Two of the six cubes are accessible. The third one is the start platform for a rope slide and a high rope track. In the top box people can enjoy a panorama view of the surrounding landscape and there is a starting platform for abseiling. The athletes on the 13 meters high climbing wall are observed by visitors of the adjacent bistro.Huge stacks of logs can be found in the surrounding production forest. The cladding of the tower consists of the same halved, stripped logs. This way it is an addition, as well a product of it’s surroundings.

http://www.archdaily.com/

The Curious Link Between Minefields, Tuberculosis and Rats.

As a boy, Bart Weetjens used to breed rats and sell them to pet stores. Well, until he found out the pet stores sold them to reptile owners as food. Now Bart is back in business with his rats but this time he’s training them to sniff out land mines and tuberculosis. And there pretty good at it. At first people scoffed at the crazy rat lover’s idea, now his company Apopo, or as it is also known, Herorats, is making waves in scientific research and humanitarian work.

At present, more than 100 million landmines have been deployed in more than 90 countries and they kill or maim 40 to 55 people per day on average, according to an estimate by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Combatants continue to lay 40,000 new mines each year and it is thought that at present rates, it will take 500 years to remove them all.

As Bart explained in a presentation to the non-profit Samasource, yesterday, “Land mines form a structural barrier to development”. As long as there is the possibility of land mines in areas, no business or even the nearby population will risk developing the hazardous land. In fact, in one town in Tanzania the barrier for development was such that the entire town effectively relocated. The town of 25,000 people dwindled substantially due to just 4 mines that were located around the town’s well.

So where do the rats come in? Clearing the minefields is a huge burden to developing countries, they simply cannot afford to do it themselves. As such, humanitarian organisations are involved in most of the de-mining. However, nearly all mine clearers come from the foreign organisations and must be heavily trained. A trained de-miner can scour about a 100m squared area of land in a day, with the use of metal detectors and sometimes dogs. The Herorats can cover the same area in just 30 minutes. And they also provide a sustainable channel of employment for the local population. The rats can be fairly easily trained for the job by people who, themselves, have received simple training. This leads to local run de-mining. While foreign help is obviously still a benefit – the mines are removed – the local community does not benefit from the economic potential of employment in this area.

Why rats?

Animals can be trained to sniff out mines, thus equaling the effect of a metal detector. However, animals have a greater speed of scouring. Further, animals can detect plastic covered mines where the metal detectors fail. Ok, so animals are good, but why not dogs then? Firstly, dogs can cost up to $40,000 to buy and train and in addition the rats are so light that they face no risk in setting off the mines in this dangerous work.

So it seems Weetjens has struck a gold mine with his rats, and one that won’t explode. And as if the story could get any better, the Herorats also have their sights set on huge developments in scientific research. Right now the rats can detect Tuberculosis in saliva samples with an accuracy almost equal to trained professionals. A lab technician can test 40 samples in a day, Apopo’s rats: 2000. That’s the same 40 samples in just 7 minutes.

The rat loving, Buddhist monk from Belgium, Bart Weetjens is definitely on to something. You can adopt a rat and help his cause for just 5c a month.

Why Golden Gate Park is the shit

I thought it was just one park. But apparently not, so says my tea mug this morning. The extension of Golden Gate National Parks is the world's largest urban National Park.
- 1210 Historic structures
- 114 square miles of open space
- 78 shipwrecks
- 23 rare and endangered species (Bison included)
- 12 sandy beaches
- 10 historic forts
- 5 lighthouses
- 2 Redwood forests
- 1 Large Red Bridge

In honor of Billie Holiday

Billie Holiday died exactly 50 years ago today. I think she could have the best voice of all time. I'm not sure...

Billie Holiday "Come Rain or Come Shine"

The Day Lady Died
by Frank O'Hara

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

Two I like

These two works are currently in the contemporary portion of the permanent collection gallery:



1) Kiki Smith "Lilith" (1994, bronze & Glass)

There's a good chance I like this work mostly because it looks like a mix of Rebecca Romijn's character from the X-Men films and some sort of spiderwoman. How comic-booky of me, eh? The piece is just badass - a heavy bronze cast hangs inverted on the gallery wall as the figure's cold glass eyes beam your way. Although Smith makes her casts from actual human models, she manages to make this work seem more like a creature than a person. The texture of the casting reminds me of some 19th century work, with the roughness and the touch of the artist intact As for the title, here is what I found online:

Lilith is a biblical figure who has long been adopted by feminists. In Jewish lore, she is the first wife of Adam, exiled from the Garden of Eden for her unwillingness to bend to Adam’s will, and is ultimately replaced by Eve. In this mythical story, she is cast out and becomes a demon bringing death and disease to those she encounters throughout history. Feminist literature invokes her image as a woman literally demonized because of her unwillingness to be subservient. Lilith is thus both a sympathetic and a terrifying figure.

2) Katharina Fritsch "Kind mit Pudeln (Baby with Poodles)" 1995/1996 plaster, foil, polyurethane, and paint

Here is the wall text. I don't buy all of it ("Fritsch chose the poodle as a dog that is cute and beguiling but can also be aggressive and mean" & "While out walking, Faust sees a black poodle and brings it home, unknowingly inviting the devil into his study. The baby suggests the innocence of children at birth, untouched by evil and misfortune.") I just think the repeated poodles are fanciful and friggin cute. I'd like to take one home and stick it in my lawn.

Four circles of 224 poodles, arranged in tight, densely packed rings, surround an infant poised on an eight-pointed gold star. The points of the star create eight radiating axes by which the poodles are aligned. The result is a stunning visual play of repetitive patterns in space.
Fritsch's intention is to lodge an indelible visual image in the mind of the viewer, indissolubly fusing experience and memory. Although some viewers may find the poodles threatening, they also appear to be on alert watch, guarding over the child. And despite the ominous atmosphere, a strange undercurrent of humor is present in the quirky oddness of both the poodles and the baby.
Fritsch chose the poodle as a dog that is cute and beguiling but can also be aggressive and mean. Soon after completing the piece, she recalled that a poodle appears in the story of Faust, retold in a nineteenth-century novel by Johann Wolfgang Goethe that is known to every German schoolchild. While out walking, Faust sees a black poodle and brings it home, unknowingly inviting the devil into his study. The baby suggests the innocence of children at birth, untouched by evil and misfortune. As it begins the journey of life, it must face the tensions of civilization and the potential for corruption.

Janine Antoni & Chocy

Welp, after an eventfilled weekend of camping (we even got our tent peed on - drunk offender remarked "I hope ya like asparagus" as we cowered inside), veiny yogis, spastic DJs, our first fine food in two months, and an updated mid-century spectacle, Xan and I are once again sitting static in front of our computer screens. Hence, more blog posts!

Exciting things from Monday so far:

1) a Richard Avedon test cake is now available at the Rooftop Garden Cafe...it eluded me today but I will get a slice soon.

2) The SFMOMA just opened their new exhibit "Not New Work: Vincent Fecteau Selects" and it is really wonderful. I found the pieces to be mostly kooky (see the pink snowman-esque Max Ernst piece below) or mysterious (favorite example: a half-erased Diego Rivera drawing - and I don't even like Diego Rivera!). The show also deals with the idea of the exhibition narrative - how pieces flow and connect to one another. Vincent Fecteau, a local sculptor, picked the pieces and planned the lay-out of the show instead of a curator. The result is a set of pieces selected and organized based on an artist's emotional response (ie how did Fecteau feel when he came across this piece in the archives) instead the more academic, theme-based decisions of a curator.

Max Ernst, Bauta, 1964; Collection SFMOMA, gift of Peggy Guggenheim; © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

Fecteau's witty contemporary sculpture selections reminded me of another artist's work that the SFMOMA displays from time to time. Janine Antoni works with odd media (here chocolate and soap) to create her sculptures. These things must be difficult to transport, especially the chocolate one. I can't even keep a pack of M&Ms in my pocket without melting them...

What strikes me most about the pieces is their craftsmanship. Cutting chocolate and soap is miserable - so flaky and unpredictable. Antoni's smooth surfaces and details are all the more impressive, not to mention unique, when executed with such fickle substances.

Lick and Lather Series (Soap & Chocolate)

Lick and Lather Series (Soap)

The Bittersweet Comedown

The novelist Paul Fournel wrote, "With the end of the Tour de France, the summer reaches its moment of sadness: long, hot afternoons and no longer anything to get your teeth into."

From the green fields that engulfed the pelaton in the initial stages, to the moon surface of Mont Ventoux; the battle for the green jersey to the dominance of the yellow; and from the veteran Lance to the spring chick Schleck's - the rest of my summer will not be quite the same. And they say this tour wasn't even a very exciting one!

Word on the street is next year Armstrong will battle it out against Contador to show that cheeky little llama who's boss. They'll likely be the captains of different teams giving us viewers an awesome spectacle of one on one rivalry and team on team tactics.

For now, then we are left to revel in the excitement of the past three weeks, watch Les Triplettes de Belleville and bid on the Livestrong bikes (...yeah right!).

Les Triplettes de Belleville - Rendezvous

Alvin Ailey

I often fail to appreciate dance. I'm sure I still fail with Alvin Ailey, but I still feel an emotional attachment, a warmth when I see his work. Perhaps its the music (GOD it's good...no pun intended). Without further delay...

Kook-arucucu: Daniel Suelo lives in a cave for over a decade sans money

Photograph by Mark Heithoff

Daniel Suelo lives in a cave in Moab, UT and has survived without any money since 2000! Holy holy! Apparently, he takes time out of his busy life to write a blog Living Without Money, which he updates for free at the local library. Sounds a lot like the Peace Core to me...Here is an article for Details about Danny boy.

He's back and it's no less than we would expect

He may be a gremlin but he is genius - Yoda has done it again. Thom Yorke played his new acoustic track, "The Present Tense" live at the Latitude Festival. This man is yet to disappoint.



Deviantart.com

Lance Armstrong's Bikes + Art: What could be better?

Oh Happy Day! Artistic road bikes are this woman's new froyo (not just any froyo - good fraiche shit). And I cannot deny my love for Lance...I follow his twitter updates at work. Tweet Tweet!

According to the Trek Bikes Website, all of these things are now rolled into one:

Trek, The Lance Armstrong Foundation, Nike, and the most influential artists of a generation have teamed up to produce a unique collection of bicycles and art without peer.
The Exhibition opens at the Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Paris before traveling to the United States this fall. All work is available for purchase with proceeds directly benefiting the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

Anyone want to buy me a new bicycle? Here are some photos:

This bike with a "stroboscopic" rear wheel design (apparently meaning that the wheel looks like it's pulsing as it spins) was used for Lance's opening time trial this year. The bike was designed by Australian-born, London-based Marc Newson, "a revolutionary designer whose work in the fields of aerospace, furniture, product, jewelry, interior, and vehicle design have earned him countless accolades from the design community."

"Deceptively simple. Naive. Childlike. All words that might be used to describe the first look at Yoshitomo Nara's work. Inspection reveals a deeper truth — saws, knives, and sharp implements often grace the hands of his young subjects, who often possess a look of anger, cynicism, or concern. "

Pretty dramatic for a bike, eh? Athletes love drama (at the very least, American sports announcers do. SportsCenter is absurd.) Anyway, this design was created by a Japanese contemporary artist - Yoshitomo Nara - who, from what I can tell, likes to use seemingly cute images (pastel skinned children, bubbly cloud fonts) as a misleading front for his true darker intentions (the kids on this bike have boxing gloves and are swarmed with UFOs). Apparently he is a big music fan and attributes much of the energy seen in his work to his love of punk music. In a touching personal gesture, Nara also included a moving inspirational message handwritten across the top tube of the bike's frame, visible only when Armstrong's head is deep in an aerodynamic tuck: "Never Forget Your Beginner's Spirit."

Robert Ogata - I'm writin his blurbs!

Needs editing...but these are some of the blurbs I drafted for the next SFMOMA Artists Gallery show (i hope they use them...)

Robert Katsusuke Ogata’s career has been both lasting and exceptionally dynamic. Growing up Japanese-American in Fresno, CA, Ogata’s art embraces multicultural influences and contains personal reflections on his internment experience in Arizona as well as the essence of Central California’s landscape. Although his work is broad in scope, Ogata emphasizes awareness and self-criticism as the essence of his art:

“The process of my development as a painter has led me to constant amendment, revision and expansion as an evolving definition of my work.”

Ogata’s pieces are typically demarcated as part of a series. Although later in life he gave up his ceramic pursuits, Ogata has worked in charcoal, graphite, clay, paint, oil, polymer, shellac, chalk and gold leaf and he frequently employs non-traditional methods of application. Some results of his experimentation are permanently adapted, such as his focus on forms alluding to nature, his sensitivity to the use of line and his regard for restraint and order. Some innovations, however, remain ephemeral elements in the broader spectrum of his work.

“Because I work in themes, or series, certain elements are carried over; imagery emerges and is obliterated as I progress through a sequence of paintings”

In this exhibition, a keen eye will reveal both consistencies and innovation throughout the lengthy career of Robert Ogata.

The Influence of Environment

Robert Ogata’s life has been marked by communities. He grew up the middle of three sons in the San Joaquin Valley and at the age of 8, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. He and his family were forcibly relocated to the Gila Bend Relocation Center in Arizona. They shared the spaces at Gila with other barracked families and kids for three years before returning to California. In 1995, fifty years after internment, Ogata created a series that focused on his experiences and emotions while living at Gila.

After establishing a family of his own, Ogata spent many years working from home. Ogata’s daughter Amy recalls her father working from within “temporary spaces, created out of the ordinary chaos of middle class family life.” He now has a studio of his own in downtown Fresno, a change that Amy believes “has changed his work.”

Despite this move to a private studio, Ogata remains involved in Fresno’s art community. He has worked as a high school teacher, founded Fig Tree Gallery in 1962 and….

Central California’s environment has also had a lasting influence on Ogata’s paintings:

“The particular marks or shapes I use draw interest and create limited space. Most recently a rectangle has morphed into a suggestion of a core. Within this context I continue to explore references to atmosphere and illusion, elements directly related to living in the San Joaquin Valley. The presence of the Sierra Mountains on a clear day heightens the flatness of the valley. A shroud of winter fog, and lately, summer air pollution, often obscures these same features. Because I work in themes, or series, certain elements are carried over; imagery emerges and is obliterated as I progress through a sequence of paintings”

Blending Cultural Identities

Much of Ogata’s work references the aesthetics of his Japanese heritage while also suggesting his American identity.

In his Hana series from 2008, Ogata uses gold leaf, chrysanthemum flowers, long vertical paint drips and rectangular forms to artfully identify his dual identity. The shallow, almost one-dimensional nature of the works references traditional Japanese Ukiyo-e landscapes and prints. The chrysanthemums, subdued colors and solemn rectangles hint at the Zen tenet that painting is a form of meditation. Yet the abstract forms, especially the drips made famous by Jackson Pollock, highlight the American abstract expressionist ideal that art is best when it expresses the emotions and nature of the individual.

The Kabuto series (2002) features large painting composed of an unusual color palette. Red paint strikes yellow ochre surfaces and black strokes inspired by forms found on medieval Japanese armor give geometrics and structure to the works. Although these black streaks reference traditional Japanese imagery, their abstract nature allows them to be read as a roof or a mountaintop.

Ogata’s ceramic forms also seem to reference medieval Japanese precedents. Indeed, his works were fired by a traditional anagama, a variation of the 5th century Korean kiln. During these firings the unglazed ware, affected by a directional flame, deposits ash on the shoulders of the ceramic forms, accumulating and forming glaze throughout the several days of firing. Despite his traditional techniques, Paul Chaleff, who helped construct the kiln with Ogata, emphasized the essential American qualities of the pieces: “In detail, Ogata’s ceramic work is unmistakably American and is a product of his American training and eye.” Ogata’s pieces allude to American ceramicist Peter Voulkos, especially in their shared appreciation of defects. Ogata’s platters have deep cracks and he often alters the clay with the addition of abnormal substances such as granite stones. In this way, Ogata employs the very western ideal of making the materials work to suit a concept instead of altering a concept to suit one’s materials.

Things Hipsters Like

The renegade craft fair at Fort Mason last weekend showed us that venturing into the cutting edge of SF fashion is, in actual fact, more like trudging through an expanse of repeating scenery. We're all trying to be unique but the father of hipster style just threw up all over us young'uns. Musty clothes, janitor keys, debut albums, Obama and neon framed sunglasses are all around us and we can't get away from it. We can't help ourselves.
Before we begin the festivities of the Hipster Hit Parade, let us savor a little of the Hipster Olympics:

The Secret to Salad Woes - 101 Easy, Exciting Leaf Licking Delights

FRESH AND FRESHER Clockwise, from top left: tuna, egg, green beans (No. 56); carrots, blueberries, sunflower seeds (7); croutons, tomatoes, mozzarella (42); walnuts, blue cheese, raspberries (49); couscous, oranges, honey (95). strawberries, tomatoes, Parmesan (13);

Gotta keep this article on file. Gimme GREEN!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/22/dining/22mlist.html?hp

Adventures in SF - Irving Street

X and I live right next to 19th avenue, the main bloodline to the Golden Gate Park and the Bridge. The commercial center of the area is Irving Street and we are overwhelmingly the minority. It's AWESOME. I'm on the lookout for the cantonese phrase for "white person" which, phonetically to me at least, is "why goh rahn."

Anywho, we have amazing pho noodles and roast duck, plus all the boba tea our little hearts desire (our current mission is to make boba in the home - all attemps thus far have been pathetic failures).

One piece of signage that embodies the area is this adorable First 5 California (parenting tips - good stuff) advert that we meet at the bus stop on our way to work everyday. As soon as I saw it, I said to myself that's it. I'm stealin me a korean baby!


In other Irving St sign news, do not honk when the nesquik rabbit asks you to. I friggin love nesquik, I am quite often happy, but I'm never honking again. I scared the shit out of everyone on our street and got flipped off.

this is not our street...i sacked this from google images.

New Look that's Razing Eyebrows

The Guardian, Monday July 20th 2009.
'In Givenchy's latest advertising campaign, eight male and female models recline in a French chateau looking curiously androgenous. Each is eyebrowless. The eyebrow, it seems, has become "excess" hair. Agyness Deyn, Lily Donaldson and Linda Evangelista have all gone eyebrowless recently.

Makeup artist Pat McGrath worked on the Balenciaga and Prada shows, both of which featured bleached-out brows. "The current economic troubles open people up to be more daring and willing to don cutting-edge looks," she says.

At a time when advertising is suffering, is eyebrowlessness just a more extreme way for a brand to sell its products? Or perhaps the prevalence of Botox (no frowning or eyebrow raising) means we simply have no need for them?

However, Lisa Oxenham, beauty and style editor at Marie Claire, advises: "Brows give a face expression - when they are not there the look hardens." And "it is not advised if your face is round, long or if you're hungover".'

Not sure I'm convinced by all this eyebrow malarky.

Julie Mehretu "Stadia I" (2004)

This is Julie Mehretu. (badass photie right?). She is an Ethiopian-born American artist who won the McArthur Award (aka Genius Grant) in 2005. She also is quoted as saying: "Maps aren't necessarily truths." I friggin agree! I'll have none of that "in this day and age, technology is certainly advanced enough to make a precise map" bologna. Just think about shrinking the size of massive spaces into a digestible collection of grids and tree clumps and suddenly the accepted validity of maps seems absurd. It's crazy to think about (and thus all the more tantalizing) cuz damn my teachers and text books really convinced me, but I'm convinced maps are a human construct and ultimately a paper-based drawing of a nonexistent microland.

Anyway, Mehretu's work focuses less on what is inaccurate or misleading about maps and more on what is missing from the dry, structured classic. At first glance, her messy, complex paintings suggest the chaotic feel of a traveler's first glance at a foreign city's map. Her confusing layers encourage us to examine the spaces included in cartography. Her "maps" contain not just physical space, but political space and demographics. The first layers are architectural grids inspired by the conventions of map-making, while her later layers add new elements. The swirls of ink hint at the clumping and grouping of humans living in the depicted areas. In the image below (part of the Stadia series, which aims to collect the viewpoints experienced by the masses of people that occupy a stadium), rows of pennants and flags streak across the canvas in all directions and distances. Diverse colors and shapes provide templates needed to imagine any flag from any country in the world.

Without all this background info, I loved Mehretu's piece immediately. Aesthetically, I think it is spot-on and of-the-moment in such a precise way that I am incapable to express why. I just look at the work and smirk - she nailed it.

Julie Mehretu American, born Ethiopia (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1970)
Stadia I
2004 painting ink and acrylic on canvas

And finally, here is a song that reminds me of the piece. His voice is chaotic, unpredictable in its tonal changes, but the song as a whole brings so much joy.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Over and Over Again (Lost and Found)

July 12, 2009

Inside His Exteriors

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

Tokyo

AFTER nearly four decades of work Toyo Ito has earned a cult following among architects around the world, although he is little known outside his home country, Japan. Through his strange and ethereal buildings, which range from modest houses for the urban recluse to a library whose arched forms have the delicacy of paper cutouts, he has created a body of work almost unmatched in its diverse originality.

Over the past decade, as the popularity of architecture has boomed and many of his contemporaries have jetted around the globe piling up one commission after another, Mr. Ito has largely remained on the sidelines. He is rarely mentioned in conversations about semicelebrities like Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid or Jacques Herzog. He has repeatedly been passed over for the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honor, in favor of designers with much thinner résumés. Even in his native country he is overshadowed by Tadao Ando, whose brooding concrete structures have become a cliché of contemporary Japanese architecture.

Mr. Ito’s status may finally be about to change. On Thursday a stadium he designed for the World Games will be unveiled to a global audience in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Its pythonlike form should produce as much a stir, at least within architectural circles, as did the Bird’s Nest stadium by Mr. Herzog and Pierre de Meuron when it was unveiled a year ago at the Beijing Olympics.

Even more ambitious are his plans for the Taichung opera house, which is scheduled to go into construction sometime next year. A work of striking inventiveness, it has already been touted as a masterpiece. Its porous exterior, which resembles a gigantic sponge, is as wildly imaginative in its way as Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain. Its design was a large reason Mr. Ito was recently awarded his first American commission, the Berkeley Art Museum in California.

But even if Mr. Ito begins to land the big, lucrative commissions that he so obviously deserves, he may never be completely accepted by a broad popular audience. He does not have the intimidating, larger-than-life persona of a Koolhaas. Nor is he a flamboyant presence like Ms. Hadid, who is often compared to an opera diva because of her striking looks and imperial air.

Mr. Ito, by comparison, can be unassuming. A small, compact man with a round face framed by rectangular glasses and dark bangs, he is easygoing and rarely flustered. And he has the rare ability to consider his projects with a critical eye, even going so far as to point out flaws that a visitor might have overlooked.

What’s more, his work can be maddeningly difficult to categorize. No two Ito buildings look exactly alike. There is no unifying aesthetic style, no manifesto to advance. You can never be sure what Mr. Ito will do next, which can be thrilling for architects but nerve-racking for clients (another reason, perhaps, that his work isn’t better known).

What his buildings do share is a distrust of simplistic formulas. His career can be read as a lifelong quest to find the precise balance between seemingly opposing values — individual and community, machine and nature, male and female, utopian fantasies and hard realities.

His ability to find such balances consistently has made him one of our great urban poets, someone who has been able to crystallize, through architecture, the tensions that lie buried in the heart of contemporary society. It makes his work especially resonant today, when much of the world is drawn to one form of extremism or another.

Mr. Ito, who was born in 1941, began his career at a pivotal time in Japanese architecture. As a student in the 1960s he followed Modernists like Kenzo Tange as they rebuilt the country’s cultural confidence after the devastation of World War II. His first job was in the office of Kiyonori Kikutake, a founder of the Metabolist movement, which envisioned gigantic flexible structures that could adapt to a society in constant flux. It established Mr. Kikutake and his cohorts as prominent figures of the international avant-garde.

Serpentine Gallery - designed by Ito

But that decade of cultural optimism was short lived. By the 1970 Osaka Expo, which served as a showcase for the country’s top architectural talents, Metabolism had been practically reduced to a fad, its social agenda stripped of its original meaning.

“All the big concepts were drained of idealism,” Mr. Ito told me as we rode a bullet train through the Japanese countryside on the way to visit one of his buildings. “It was very disappointing for the young generation. It became very hard to have any outward hope about the future.”

This crisis of faith — the sudden awareness of the powerlessness of architects, if not of architecture — was soon followed by a prolonged economic recession, which meant that the kinds of large-scale public commissions available to many postwar architects were gone.

Looking for a way forward Mr. Ito was drawn to the work of Kazuo Shinohara, a vocal critic of the Metabolists who believed that if architecture could change the world at all, it would do so not by promoting radical social visions but by creating small, modest spaces to nurture and protect the individual spirit. His houses, mostly build it in the 1960s and 1970s, were conceived as private utopias, with delicate interiors supported by muscular concrete pillars that seemed designed to resist the outside pressures of a corrupting society.

Mr. Ito took this idea to its extreme in 1976 with the White U house, which was organized around a central court and completely shut off from the outside world. Designed for his older sister, whose husband had died of cancer, its seamless white interiors were meant to create an intensely private, therapeutic environment, a place where she could recover from her grief. Only the tops of a few surrounding buildings and utility poles were visible from inside, a gentle reminder that life continued beyond its walls.

But eventually this vision seemed as limiting as the Metabolist’s vision seemed naïve, and Mr. Ito would locate his architecture in the space between two extremes: the social idealism of late Modernism and the inwardness of Shinohara’s work.

His breakthrough came with the Sendai Mediatheque, a library and exhibition space completed in 2001. Seen from a distance the structure looks like a conventional Modernist glass box rising from one of Sendai’s busy, tree-lined boulevards. The first hint of something out of the ordinary is a series of enormous white latticework tubes that pierce the top of the structure, capped by a delicate steel frame. The tubes seem to be arranged in a loose, almost random pattern, and as you get closer, you realize they extend down through the entire structure, connecting the floors. They not only hold up the building, they house elevators, staircases and mechanical systems. Sunlight, reflected from gigantic, computer-controlled mirrors, spills through them during the day, giving the building an ethereal glow.

“The tubes are often compared to trees in a forest,” Mr. Ito told me through a translator as we toured the building. “But they are also like objects in a Japanese garden, where space is created by movement around carefully arranged points, like ponds or stones.”

The idea was to free us, both physically and psychologically, from the rigidity of the grid and what it implies — the Cartesian logic, the erasure of individual identity. But the building is not just an isolated experiment. By echoing the forms of the conventional slab buildings around it and aggressively distorting them, the design suggests how the city too could be made more free and more human.

This vision takes on even greater complexity in the Tama Art University Library, completed just over two years ago, west of Tokyo. Set at the edge of a dreary hillside campus, the structure was conceived as an irregular grid of delicate concrete arches.

When I first saw it, it brought to mind the work of Louis Kahn, who — in an effort to root modern architecture in an ancient past — used classical references to imbue glass, concrete and steel with an aura of historical monumentality. But Mr. Ito’s design turns this idea on its head. The arches that line the library’s exterior vary in width from 6 feet to nearly 50 feet, giving them an offhand, whimsical quality. Windows are set flush to the arches’ concrete surfaces so that the facades have a taut appearance, as if the building had been sealed in shrink wrap.

Inside, the arches are arranged at odd angles to one another. Other structures seem casually placed inside the space — a large concrete drum that houses mechanical systems at one end, a sculptural staircase at another. The floor of an informal exhibition space follows the slope of the surrounding landscape so that from inside, the relationship of the two seems fluid.

The result is a kind of antimonument. The image we hold of a heavy, traditional arch becomes something fragile and ethereal. The classical sense of order dissolves. The design’s aim is to liberate us from the oppressive weight of history and, in the process, open up imaginative possibilities.

Since the library’s completion his ambitions have led to a startling range of new designs. The concave roof segments of his recently opened Za-Koenji Public Theater in Tokyo, for instance, are vaguely reminiscent of Shinohara’s House Under High-Voltage Lines (1981). But Mr. Ito’s structure is more animated, reflecting the energy of its bustling working-class site.

Seen from an elevated rail line that passes directly in front of it, the theater’s uneven tentlike form seems to be a result of the forces colliding around it, like speeding trains and arcane zoning requirements. Inside, a wide elliptical staircase at the back corner of the lobby draws people up through the building. Big porthole windows are carved into its roof and walls. It is a simple, inexpensive building, yet its enigmatic form lingers in the imagination and transforms your perception of the neighborhood around it.

The design for the 44,000-seat Kaohsiung stadium, by contrast, seems to be as much about the anxieties of a mass event as about a shared emotional experience. While traditional stadiums are designed to shut out the outside world, Mr. Ito’s stadium seeks to maximize our awareness of it while still creating a sense of enclosure.

From the main entry the stadium looks like a gigantic snake that is just beginning to coil around its prey. Its tail extends to one side, framing a large entry plaza. At times when the stadium is less full, people will be able to stroll through the gates from the plaza and sit on a patch of grass at the edge of the field, eroding the boundary between inside and out.

Inside, the intertwining pipes of the canopy curl down and around the stands, enveloping the audience. And while the immediate surroundings are shut out, most seats have a distant view of downtown. The result is remarkable: a space that manages to maintain the intensity and focus of a grand stadium without that intensity becoming oppressive.

Yet it is in his design for the Taichung opera house, scheduled to go into construction sometime next year, that Mr. Ito comes closest to an ideal he has been chasing for decades: a building that seems to have been frozen in a state of metamorphosis. Set in a landscaped park, the opera house is conceived as a flexible network of interconnected vessels that has been sliced off on four sides to form a rectangular box.

The amorphous forms are not random; their seemingly elastic surfaces grow and shrink according to the functions they house, which include restaurants, foyers, a roof garden and three concert halls that will seat from 200 and 2,000 people. Visitors will find themselves slipping between some of these forms and entering others. The sense of inside and out, of stillness and motion, becomes a complex, carefully composed dance.

It is a striking vision, as beautiful as anything built in the past decade. And it sums up Mr. Ito’s philosophy about both architecture and life, about the need to accommodate the many contradictions that make us human.

It also suggests a way architecture can move forward.

At the beginning of this century the field seemed to have entered a new age of freedom and experimentation. But like everything else, that spirit was quickly subsumed by the competitive greed of the global economy: the money, the real estate speculation, the frantic rush for consumer attention. Designs that were born of joy and exuberance, like Mr. Gehry’s Guggenheim, were treated as marketable commodities, which became a kind of trap.

Seen in that light, the inaccessibility of Mr. Ito’s architecture is a virtue. Hard to pin down, it is also difficult to brand. By embracing ambiguity, his work forces us to look at the world through a wider lens. It asks us to choose the slowly unfolding narrative over the instant fix.

“I sometimes feel that we are losing an intuitive sense of our own bodies,” Mr. Ito lamented at one point during my visit. “Children don’t run around outside as much as they did. They sit in front of computer games. Some architects have been trying to find a language for this new generation, with very minimalist spaces. I am looking for something more primitive, a kind of abstraction that still has a sense of the body.”

“The in between,” he added, “is more interesting to me."

A tour soundtrack

Katina Huston,"And..and...and," 2006; ink on mylar; 36 x 72 in

Two old-eesh songs that I've stumbled upon. Both serve as a nice soundtrack for watching the Tour de France - Bela for the start of the race and Arcade Fire for the epic end of an Alps climb.

In Argentina, 'Pepsi' Logo Acquires Local Flavor by Bob Mondello

All Things Considered, July 17, 2009 · Billboards have gone up in the last few days in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with the familiar red, white and blue Pepsi logo, but under it, the word "PECSI."
It's a classic case of if you can't beat 'em, join em: Pepsi has decided that since people in Buenos Aires have been ordering "pecsi's" at refreshments stands for decades, there's no real point in fighting them. On the billboards, under the word PECSI, are Spanish words that mean "freedom of expression" or "freedom of pronunciation."

That's a freedom that folks in Buenos Aires take seriously. Portenos, as they're known, have been been pronouncing things unlike the rest of the world — even the rest of the Spanish-speaking world — for ages. For instance, y's and double-l's, pronounced "yuh" from Spain to Mexico, are pronounced "sshhh" here. This writer's last name, for instance, is apt to come out "Mondesshho."
So "pecsi," it has been, and now the Pepsi Company seems to be saying, "Hey call us anything you like, just drink it." Actually, Coke has a product that could have tried this same campaign: When people in Buenos Aires say "Sprite," they drop both the s sound at the beginning of the word, and the t sound at the end, so the word comes out "pri."
There's also the fact that Spanish is a consistent language in terms of pronunciation. So folks here, having learned that the words "like" and "strike" have silent e's at the end, mostly assume that the famous shoe company is called "nike." Perfectly logical. If you say you want some "nikes," people send you to a shoe store. Pecsi, as always, will get you a bubbly beverage — unless, of course, you prefer "pri."

The Rooftop Garden

My new favorite place is the SFMOMA Rooftop Garden. Such a petite paradise!




And what's more....there's cake! Read this article about the Piet Mondrian and Thiebaud inspired desserts served atop SFMOMA's aesthetic playground.

Wayne Thiebaud in paint (one of the SFMOMA's pieces) and Thiebaud in living color

Piet Mondrian gets caked!