wake up!

So yesterday B and I went into SF in the afternoon to visit our friends D and P and get some cultcha. We went to the deYoung museum in Golden Gate Park and took in the Louise Nevelson exhibit.

For some reason I did not know who Nevelson was. I read her bio on the large placard and started looking at her mostly wood sculptures, but she was unfamiliar to me. A gap in my art education. I liked her work a lot, her way of using found scrap wood and then painting it all matte black (later white and still later gold) and then assembling it into towering cubes of surfaces, patterns, shadow and depth. I liked her obvious cubism influences and her prints and drawings.

When looking at a wooden piece (shown above) called Model for Night Presence IV, I suddenly did a double take. I knew this work, or at least the work it was a study for. Night Presence IV is in fact a huge metal sculpture situated on Park Avenue (in the middle of the boulevard) at 92nd street, the intersection nearest to my parents’ apartment.

I never really liked that sculpture much. It’s a muddy brown color and the scale is kind of oppressive. Also, we were young when we moved up there (it had only been dedicated, it turns out, a year earlier), and it’s not quite the right size for climbing on, especially when compared to Hans Christian Andersen or the Mad Hatter in Central Park.

The shapes were incomprehensible to me as well, but looking at the small wooden sculpture I liked it very much. I could see that the cut round pieces of wood were from balustrades or carpentry. The wavy columns looked sensuous and inviting. The shape harmonious overall. Was it simply a matter of scale? Looking at a photo of the large sculpture (and consulting the memory imprinted in my mind) the proportions seem different, but is that simply a matter of foreshortening and perspective or did she truly alter the design when going from the wooden model to the metal final version?

Also, will I now appreciate and even like the sculpture next time I’m visiting at home, now that I know who made it and how it was made? Only time will tell.

Well it took nearly forever, but I’ve finally got all my photos from my trip to Oaxaca posted to Flickr. I organized them into umpteen sets by event and then collected those all together into one master collection, linked from earlier in this sentence. The badge in this entry points to the same photos except because the badges don’t work with collections yet it does so by pointing to a unique tag applied to all the photos.

I have stories to tell from the trip as well, but one thing at a time.

UPDATE: for some reason the Flash badge I tried inserting is breaking here in my blog even though the code for it seems to work in a number of other test situations. I’m looking into that now. Meanwhile, I’ve tried making a non-Flash badge and inserting that above in the hopes that that will resolve the problem. In the meantime I’m pasting in the code for the non-working Flash badge below until I get things sorted.

UPDATED UPDATE: Well the other badge broke too. Some conflict between the CSS for the blog and for the badge, I bet. Oh well. I added a sample picture above and am parking the code for both badges below, which will render as a long hash string until or unless I figure out a way to make them work.

UPDATED UPDATED UPDATE: Even the broken badge code seemed to be breaking the rest of my blog, so I’ve removed it for now.

Posting over low bandwidth. Consider this photo a down payment toward a great deal more imagery and tales to come.

This is one of the many artworks, most with religious themes, decorating the hotel I stayed in my first night in Oaxaca, the Hostal de la Noria.

UPDATE: (or del, I have to doublecheck that) thanks Alex!

Check out this very very very very very very very cool Flickr Related Tag Browser.

OK, my bad. I take it back. The various tools for uploading photos to Flickr seem to be working just fine. It was just a hiccup.

Then again I don't like the random bunch o' photos I get in the sidebar here as much as I'd prefer perhaps the most recent.

In other news, I posted a few images to my Mr. Spontaneous photolog and adopted one of the new photo album canned designs TypePad is offering over there. It didn't re-constitute the original set of photos there and in fact they now display badly, so I may end up re-uploading them or something, but it's a sleek little design.

go, little speed racer, go!

should i post manga xian too?

hmmm, the iPhoto plug-in for Flickr seemed pretty cool. Then I hit my upload limit but that's not the fault of the plug-in. So I upgraded my account there. Then when my PayPal payment cleared (or soon thereafter; i.e., today) I tried uploading a batch of photos and it keeps stalling out on the first one, no matter what size the batch.

A problem with the plug-in? A problem with iPhoto? A problem with me? Don't know, but it's annoying.

One of my new year's resolutions was well not really but if I did make them would have been to spruce up my personal presence online. I've neglected both the journal site (wake up!) and the all-in-one compendium (my monolog at x-pollen), so i'll be working on those over the next few weeks.

Step one, add flickr photos to xianlandia.

Originally uploaded by
caterina
on 31 Dec 69, 4.00pm PST

Posted by xian from

Well, I'm posting this partly just to test the flickr-to-weblog interface but also because there's something indescribably delicious about the idea of bread-in-a-can.

Sometime when I'm headed to the Berkeley Bowl late in the day and my digital camera's battery is charged up, I grab the cam and stick in my pocket because there are times when the parking lot of the Bowl will provide several wide vistas showing interesting East Bay cloudscapes or sunsets. There's something about the spot, a kind of wide-open crossroadslike area with a big sky overhead that often makes for fascinating images.

Pushing my cart across the parking lot on Wednesday, I noticed a purple-and-orange sunset happening down the road (I'll upload those photos later), so I paused, got out my camera, and started snapping some pictures. As I did so, I noticed a waft of clouds from overhead drifting into the sunset, so I started snapping shots up and over my head, catching segments of the wispy ribbons. Suddenly, I noticed a distinct skeletal image, a skull atop a sort of twisted body.

I couldn't believe how vivid it was. I decided it looked like skeleton riding a harley, flames or shreds of hair flowing in the wind. I briefly wondered if I was seeing an actual deliberate artwork by some local Dead head but that was clearly impossible. I looked and looked again to be sure that I wasn't imagining what I was seeing.

I also started snapping pictures because I know clouds change quickly.

It's normal for the human mind to perceive faces and other coherent images in random Brownian patterns. I realize that. I know intellectual, as a rationalist, that this was just a coincidental set of flutterings that happened to gather themselves into a freaking Rick Griffin poster in the sky.

As I kept snapping pictures I heard a black woman approach, saying something like. "Look at that! A man in the sky. It's a skeleton." As she got up to me, she asked me, "Are you a cloudwatcher? Do you see that skeleton in the sky?"

"Yeah," I said. "It's creepy. That's why I'm taking pictures." But she had already continued on and was asking the next person if they saw that man up there. I was oddly relieved that I was not the only person seeing it.

I kept taking pictures of the sunset as I pushed my cart to the curb. I passed a man selling Street Spirit at the edge of the lot, wearing a hand-me-down denim jacket with dancing bears embroidered across the shoulders. Not an uncommon sight in Berkeley, but it briefly gave me pause. Was there a message in all this, a code? Did the beggar put that image in the sky so I, a longtime Grateful Dead gomer would feel inspired to make a donation? Was he some kind of psychokinetic character out of a Jonathan Lethem novel?

I don't know. I didn't buy his paper. I wasn't moved to give this time. Superstition reared again and I wondered if the image in the sky was an omen. Should I drive especially carefully on the way home? I took a few more shots of the pattern now that it had drifted into cottony incoherence. The image was gone, but I had captured its soul in my magic box, and another human being had seen it the same way while it was happening, so I'm not crazy, right?

The picture at the top of this entry links to a halfsize image of the Harley-riding skeleton-man. I've uploaded the original picture of the sky-spectre as well. It's only about 300 K since it's mainly blue with some white.''

I've posted a gallery of photos from a recent geek dinner in San Francisco, as well a series of food and drink shots, some Halloween pumpkins, and a nighttime shot of the Bay Bridge over at my photo log, Mr. Spontaneous.

I just posted a photo album called Robots over at TypePad.

It starts from downtown Oakland where I couldn't resist taking some pictures of clouds. Longtime readers will know I find the sky endlessly amazing, especially out here at the western edge of things.

On BART, the reflections from the door windows likewise drew me in. I guess self-portraiture is inevitable. You are the only model you always have available.

The gallery was somewhat dark and kinetic, so many of the shots there are blurry but nonetheless communicate the feeling of the opening, where were served blue colored drinks in sinuous martini glasses.

teh photolog

Flowers are red
And green leaves are green
And there's no need to see flowers any other way
Than the way they always have been seen by the people who've always seen them that way
The way they always have been seen
By the people who've always been seeing them that way
Oh yeah
Baby, man

Everything tastes better when it sits on a wrist.

Alerted to tonight's lunar eclipse, B and I started looking outside around 8:40 pm hoping it wouldn't be too hazy to see the moon clearly. It came up looking kind of vague, not nearly light enough to register on my camera lens, but after about 10 or 20 minutes the croissant edge got much brighter and I was able to capture the above shot. It looked much better in real life, very 3-D as B said, something like an orange.

As the moon kept rising, more of it became exposed. I gather that the eclipse wasn't total or if the face of the moon was completely in the Earth's shadow at some point then it was as the moon was rising and before we first caught a glimpse of it.

As it was the sliver of light on the left side of the moon got larger and larger until we had a gibbous looking near-full moon, as in the second picture (which likewise does not look as sharply detailed or even as luminous as the moon looked in real life).

Today was also recycling day (or tomorrow morning is the pickup rather). We put a lot of stuff out since over the last few weeks we've completely cleaned out and overhauled my home office. That's a story for another day, but the effect is that I can function much more easily here and find a persistent edge of anxiety that has haunted me for years to be tamped down to nearly nil. For the first time in a long while I don't feel seriously behind on anything or that some nagging issue that I've forgotten about is going to suddenly erupt from a paper earthwork and bite me most righteously on the ass.

Some combination of the full moon and the weekly visitations from recycling scavengers lead to a raucous, noisy evening out on our usually sedate pseudo-suburban street. When I noticed someone poking through our glass and metal recyclables, my inner New Yorker came out and I shouted something like, "What are you doing?!" The man turned and saluted me and kept on rummaging till he was satisfied. I don't own this place and I damn well have no control over what goes on on the curb.

When I was growing up, whenever there was loud noise or some commotion on the street outside our apartment (from the time I was ten until I moved away my family lived on the ground floor - my parents live there still), someone would say, "Must be a full moon tonight."

…then what is your mouth?

It’s great to have my new camera, though I’ll need to get a larger flashcard soon (or stop using the silly movie feature). Treated myself to lunch today at Mama’s Royal Café, the site of one of my first dates with B.