California is, for me, a complex brew. I grew up in the Bay Area so visits to that childhood domain are laden with the peculiar confluence of emotions that most of us carry, consciously and unconsciously, from our early life and family of origin. But California is also a harbinger of the future tense, offering […]
Alive and Ticking
“Had I Not Been Awake” Had I not been awake I would have missed it, A wind that rise and whirled until the roof Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore And got me up, the whole of me a-patter, Alive and ticking like an electric fence: Had I not been awake I would have […]
Incomplete is Not a Dirty Word
Assembling reality is mostly patchwork (from Anna Hepler’s exhibit at the Portland Museum of Art) More on the theme of being right and the cost of that fixation (referenced earlier in this post): An article appeared in the Sunday New York Times Book review last week that speaks to our proclivity to put blinders on […]
Genius Jason
A quick shout out for Jason Moran who was awarded a genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation. Jason is a friend and an extraordinary musician. This is so well deserved! Previous posts on Slow Muse about Jason: Light Seekers Jason Moran and The Bandwagon: Milestone Jason Moran in Cambridge Jason Moran
Mistaken Identity
Pastorelle 15 The Chinese in the drought of 1876-1879 reportedly confused rustling of dry leaves for rain when the ear’s not yet adulterated/unadulterated in the morning late at night or very early in the morning it sounds like rain. –John Taggart More about John Taggart (from PBS News Hour): Taggart has received a number of […]
- Science
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Books, Google, Intelligence and Neuroscience
Complexity and flow: Never what is seems Nicholas Carr’s latest book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, continues to spawn conversations regarding what we can and cannot know about the effect of cybertechnology on our brains and cognitive abilities. (A recent post about the book is here with links to earlier […]
The Either/Or and the Both/And
Every one of us loves our own story. We are all attached, consciously or unconsciously, to our very personal version of truth, our take on who is right, our convictions about what makes sense, our determinations about how one should live in the world. Certainly the fallacies in our thinking that blindside us about ourselves […]
Architecture and Beauty, Redux
At an outdoor temporary pavilion in the main parking lot at the Southern California Institute of Architecture are fellow architects Peter Cook, Hernan Diaz Alonso, Eric Owen Moss and Greg Lynn, where Moss is director. (Rafael Sampaio Rocha / September 26, 2010) I have had Architecture and Beauty: Conversations with Architects about a Troubled Relationship […]
Liang at the ICA
The painting by Fred H. C. Liang that hangs next to my desk. Its surface, almost impossible to capture in a photograph, pulls me into its labyrinth of layers every time. Closer view Boston-based Fred H. C. Liang is one of my favorite artists and also a finalist for the ICA’s Audrey Foster prize. He […]
- Art Making
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Ways of Working
At some level, everything is of interest to the eye…a view of one corner of my studio space How do artists work? In a recent posting on Real Clear Arts, Judith H. Dobrzynski makes the case that as mysterious as the creative process is, it is that which people most want to know. And that […]