Soulellis photo George Nakashima studio courtesy Flickr
Texture enriches a simple interior.
More after the jump.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Hospitality
Photo courtesy Flickr
Looking at the roots:Hospice: a house of rest and entertainment for pilgrims, travellers, or strangers.
Hospitable: disposed to receive or welcome kindly.
Host: a victim for sacrifice. I suppose one could read host as one who surrenders to the occasion. This maps onto the Christian communion ritual.
Gratitude is the key. Excess destroys gratitude. Care restores it.
-30- More after the jump.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
In Praise of Black
CarSpotter photo courtesy Flickr
Black solves problems.It’s elegant.
It flatters.
It’s basic.
It’s traditional.
It sets off jewelry, silks, and hair.
It’s very good value.
It’s one less variable in a chaotic world.
It fits in everywhere.
You can wear it to a funeral or wear it to work on your Harley. Sometimes, the same garments will do.
Black nylon replaces natural fibers, wood, and metal. It’s stronger than steel. Bit by bit, in my inventory, black nylon hanging shoe bags have displaced the dresser, black nylon packing cubes have organized small possessions into flexible, featherweight kits, black nylon packing envelopes have turned trunks into wardrobes.
If it’s black, I don’t have to think about it, and it’s likely to be well-designed.
-30- More after the jump.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Carving Out Time to Do Original Work
Pere Ubu photo courtesy Flickr.
The photo above is of Samuel Beckett who advised a young playwrite to "Try. Fail. Try again. Fail better."
More after the jump.
I grew up with a painter who often crashed on my parents’ couch, I read Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha during a formative month in high school, and trained after college at a vocational art school populated and staffed mostly by veterans, a couple of whom had been combat artists in the Pacific during World War Two. Half of the student body still smelled of Viet Nam. The school motto was, “Don’t get married until you can afford it.” The other motto was “Keep your overhead down” and, for the girls, “Keep your prices up.” The atmosphere was unflappable.
In 1972, keeping one’s overhead down was relatively easy, thanks to Johnson’s War on Poverty and the huge vacancy rate in inner cities. That may be bitter news now, but the principles apply. Jack Kerouac describes Japhy Rider’s (Gary Snyder’s) lifestyle in The Dharma Bums-a tiny shack in somebody’s back yard in Berkeley. Snyder, the great poet of the environment, details the thinking behind this approach in his early books. He was one of the Be-ats’, as in beatitude. James Michener’s Sayonara portrays traditional life in a tiny Japanese paper house. I am experimenting with living off-grid in a 1914 Model T garage-nothing I would permit a tenant to experience. There’s a slumlord on Queen Anne who rents out, no kidding, the crawl space under the steps of one of his apartments.
I attended a very expensive school, and student loans did not exist, so the lifestyle was very frugal. Some of the kids bought a hundred pound sack of dog kibble at the beginning of the semester and survived on that, not an option I recommend. There’s a book called The Way of the Wasp that lays out the code of behavior. Steve Jobs went to the same school. When he realized his parents were spending their retirement money on his tuition, he dropped out, couch surfed, and sat in on classes for a year and a half.
Diet for a Small Planet roughs out the basics of peasant chow, inexpensive, green, and healthful alternatives to the three squares approach that dominated when it was first published. Leah Chase’s work for the US Government Printing Office is priceless. The Cornell bread formula in the 60s Joy of Cooking produces a complete protein loaf of bread that a doughmaster friend told me was worth $7.50 in 2005.
In 1972, keeping one’s overhead down was relatively easy, thanks to Johnson’s War on Poverty and the huge vacancy rate in inner cities. That may be bitter news now, but the principles apply. Jack Kerouac describes Japhy Rider’s (Gary Snyder’s) lifestyle in The Dharma Bums-a tiny shack in somebody’s back yard in Berkeley. Snyder, the great poet of the environment, details the thinking behind this approach in his early books. He was one of the Be-ats’, as in beatitude. James Michener’s Sayonara portrays traditional life in a tiny Japanese paper house. I am experimenting with living off-grid in a 1914 Model T garage-nothing I would permit a tenant to experience. There’s a slumlord on Queen Anne who rents out, no kidding, the crawl space under the steps of one of his apartments.
I attended a very expensive school, and student loans did not exist, so the lifestyle was very frugal. Some of the kids bought a hundred pound sack of dog kibble at the beginning of the semester and survived on that, not an option I recommend. There’s a book called The Way of the Wasp that lays out the code of behavior. Steve Jobs went to the same school. When he realized his parents were spending their retirement money on his tuition, he dropped out, couch surfed, and sat in on classes for a year and a half.
Diet for a Small Planet roughs out the basics of peasant chow, inexpensive, green, and healthful alternatives to the three squares approach that dominated when it was first published. Leah Chase’s work for the US Government Printing Office is priceless. The Cornell bread formula in the 60s Joy of Cooking produces a complete protein loaf of bread that a doughmaster friend told me was worth $7.50 in 2005.
Stay out of restaurants. As a new bride in 1966, I fed my husband and me on $9 a week, shopping at the Berkeley co-op and a Fillmore district butcher shop that sold lamb neck and live chickens. This was before both Food Stamps and the Abundant Foods program that just gave away cheese and canned chicken, along with other staples and excellent mimeographed recipes. Depression-era government publications detail the most economical ways to run a household. A pressure cooker is a great shortcut. Angelo Pellegrini’s Lean Years, Happy Years is elegant and priceless.
One of Snyder’s survival strategies was to insist on being able to pay half of whatever was going on.
Getting rid of your car, if you have one, is a move that increases transportation options. Time spent riding the bus is good for composing and for planning meals. The secret to living without a car and retaining self-respect is to refuse well-intended offers of a ride, unless to refuse is unreasonable. In that case, I post a bread and butter gift roughly equal to the cost of a cab ride.
Don’t know what your personal circumstances are, or what your traditions suggest is the right way to live, but there are some new, controversial, housing units for lease on 23rd that make a certain kind of sense: they’re tiny, single rooms with a private bath and amenities for $450 a month. The way singles run around and live on WiFi in coffee shops, a set-up like that is rational, although a cluster of low-rent tenants is likely to destabilize a neighborhood. I mentioned these new rooms at dinner the other night, and two guests, young home-owning business-persons who owned two houses between them, shot each other a look, said, “We could get two side by side.” They seemed primed for a good talk on the way home.
The sad thing about living lightly is that it puts one at social risk. It’s a good way to find out who your real friends are, though. When I bailed from that first marriage, with no planning, my first option was a $17 a month cold-water room in a condemned office building on First Avenue. The second option was food and shelter chits in the Morrison Hotel. Fortunately, I had a third option and was able to stay above rock bottom. All my pals on the beach at Alki stayed with the apartment, though, so perhaps even Skid Road would have been an upgrade.
The recent documentary about Townes van Sant has a scene where friends approach the wrecked trailer where he’s living. One says to the other, “He’s in it for the music” with deep certainty. Someone called van Sant a derelict a couple of weeks ago. I dunno. It would make me sad to see my kid living like that, but he would prefer it to living off his girl friend. Drugs, of course, foul judgement. The Burnley School mentioned above trained me to understand art as a 24/7 commitment. Having put family first. I’m closer to being where you are than to where one of my contemporaries might be. Health insurance is not to be underestimated.
I think it’s wise to understand, as the Arts and Crafts community does, that no artist is a special kind of person. Each person is a special kind of artist. Alfred Fairbank said, “Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor.” That helps keep precious under control. Someone on KEXP last week said or sang, “Nobody’s first, and you’re next.” The English designer David Pye has a book about craftsmanship where he discusses the realities of marketing original work and advises craftspeople to do the 9 to 5, work nights, and hang in there until the break happens. Max de Pree, son of the founder of the Herman Miller furniture company, wrote a management classic, much of which deserves to be memorized. De Pree describes his amazement and chagrin on learning, after the death a millwright that the man had been a very good poet.
Back in the day, certain mountain climbers sawed the handles off and trimmed the bristles of their toothbrushes to save grams of weight in the pack. I think it’s possible to shave milliseconds off the time required for life support, so that even though one has full-time employment, domestic demands are minimal. The first time I vacuumed this house, it took three hours once a week. Now it takes half an hour every two or three weeks.
Assuming your job demands around forty hours a week, blasting the demands of life support will generate a decent amount of leisure to think and produce. The secret to coping with extraneous demands is to remember that routine stuff does not use the degree of focus that original work absolutely requires. I hate to tell you how recently I figured this out. And though nobody’s first and we’re all next, it’s important to remember that the less able must not be permitted to dominate in areas where one wishes to function at one’s best.
The Buddhists talk about taking care of one’s self being a prerequisite for being able to care for anyone else. I am often blindsided by others’ social aggression (and no doubt blind to my own), but fourteen years in the weight room have at least prepared me to make new mistakes. I hope my guardian angel is a boxer.
Pilates is a haven. I began to realize some of its benefits before I learned that Joseph Pilates had developed his curriculum as a prisoner of war. My sense of the discipline is that it sets things right on many levels and supports healthy self-awareness. Pilates literally unkinks my wiring.
I have to struggle to protect the Sabbath. The old blue laws that kept stores and bars closed on Sunday had their uses. Seems to me that a sabbath is a right to which no politic person will object. Even southern slaves back in the day had Sunday, I think. So, if you’re employed full-time and speculating on yourself as well, maybe it would help to define a sabbath as twenty-four hours free of the obligation to perform “unnecessary servile work”, divide that by seven, and use 3.whatever hours a day to work on your own projects. And do that first. I get up at 4:45. It’s a peaceful, wiggly world out there, even on Capitol Hill.
My kid just said a full day off is vital. So grab those three hours a day anyway and call it two days to yourself.
I fight the handmaiden syndrome, and perhaps you struggle with something similar. There’s a fine line to walk between diva and slavey. That’s where Pilates comes in, to foster righteous ambulation and delivery.
The futurist Buckminster Fuller talked in the Sixties about the ratio between productive work time and administrative overhead. That’s what the fuss was about when Ronald Reagan came into office. Don’t know what the numbers are now, but as I recall, Fuller said that production time was something like, urk! four percent. That’s hard to believe and may be incorrect, but the number was appallingly low, even to my untutored eyes.
At home, the trick is to keep the turnaround time for a given task to a minimum. My household never numbered more than three, and I found that the simplest, lowest tech procedures took the least time, cost the least to execute, and took up the least space. Shopping at stores close to bus stops integrates transportation and procurement, and I find doing so less fatiguing than herding a vehicle around a parking lot and lashing myself in and out of safety systems. Walking around reduces stress and keeps me nimble. Except for meat and produce, I do major shopping one afternoon a month, to keep my agenda sane. I finally figured out that clerical work is top priority, that handling paper is more challenging than doing the thinking those pieces of paper require, and that putting off handling paper is harder than those two tasks put together.
One of Snyder’s survival strategies was to insist on being able to pay half of whatever was going on.
Getting rid of your car, if you have one, is a move that increases transportation options. Time spent riding the bus is good for composing and for planning meals. The secret to living without a car and retaining self-respect is to refuse well-intended offers of a ride, unless to refuse is unreasonable. In that case, I post a bread and butter gift roughly equal to the cost of a cab ride.
Don’t know what your personal circumstances are, or what your traditions suggest is the right way to live, but there are some new, controversial, housing units for lease on 23rd that make a certain kind of sense: they’re tiny, single rooms with a private bath and amenities for $450 a month. The way singles run around and live on WiFi in coffee shops, a set-up like that is rational, although a cluster of low-rent tenants is likely to destabilize a neighborhood. I mentioned these new rooms at dinner the other night, and two guests, young home-owning business-persons who owned two houses between them, shot each other a look, said, “We could get two side by side.” They seemed primed for a good talk on the way home.
The sad thing about living lightly is that it puts one at social risk. It’s a good way to find out who your real friends are, though. When I bailed from that first marriage, with no planning, my first option was a $17 a month cold-water room in a condemned office building on First Avenue. The second option was food and shelter chits in the Morrison Hotel. Fortunately, I had a third option and was able to stay above rock bottom. All my pals on the beach at Alki stayed with the apartment, though, so perhaps even Skid Road would have been an upgrade.
The recent documentary about Townes van Sant has a scene where friends approach the wrecked trailer where he’s living. One says to the other, “He’s in it for the music” with deep certainty. Someone called van Sant a derelict a couple of weeks ago. I dunno. It would make me sad to see my kid living like that, but he would prefer it to living off his girl friend. Drugs, of course, foul judgement. The Burnley School mentioned above trained me to understand art as a 24/7 commitment. Having put family first. I’m closer to being where you are than to where one of my contemporaries might be. Health insurance is not to be underestimated.
I think it’s wise to understand, as the Arts and Crafts community does, that no artist is a special kind of person. Each person is a special kind of artist. Alfred Fairbank said, “Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor.” That helps keep precious under control. Someone on KEXP last week said or sang, “Nobody’s first, and you’re next.” The English designer David Pye has a book about craftsmanship where he discusses the realities of marketing original work and advises craftspeople to do the 9 to 5, work nights, and hang in there until the break happens. Max de Pree, son of the founder of the Herman Miller furniture company, wrote a management classic, much of which deserves to be memorized. De Pree describes his amazement and chagrin on learning, after the death a millwright that the man had been a very good poet.
Back in the day, certain mountain climbers sawed the handles off and trimmed the bristles of their toothbrushes to save grams of weight in the pack. I think it’s possible to shave milliseconds off the time required for life support, so that even though one has full-time employment, domestic demands are minimal. The first time I vacuumed this house, it took three hours once a week. Now it takes half an hour every two or three weeks.
Assuming your job demands around forty hours a week, blasting the demands of life support will generate a decent amount of leisure to think and produce. The secret to coping with extraneous demands is to remember that routine stuff does not use the degree of focus that original work absolutely requires. I hate to tell you how recently I figured this out. And though nobody’s first and we’re all next, it’s important to remember that the less able must not be permitted to dominate in areas where one wishes to function at one’s best.
The Buddhists talk about taking care of one’s self being a prerequisite for being able to care for anyone else. I am often blindsided by others’ social aggression (and no doubt blind to my own), but fourteen years in the weight room have at least prepared me to make new mistakes. I hope my guardian angel is a boxer.
Pilates is a haven. I began to realize some of its benefits before I learned that Joseph Pilates had developed his curriculum as a prisoner of war. My sense of the discipline is that it sets things right on many levels and supports healthy self-awareness. Pilates literally unkinks my wiring.
I have to struggle to protect the Sabbath. The old blue laws that kept stores and bars closed on Sunday had their uses. Seems to me that a sabbath is a right to which no politic person will object. Even southern slaves back in the day had Sunday, I think. So, if you’re employed full-time and speculating on yourself as well, maybe it would help to define a sabbath as twenty-four hours free of the obligation to perform “unnecessary servile work”, divide that by seven, and use 3.whatever hours a day to work on your own projects. And do that first. I get up at 4:45. It’s a peaceful, wiggly world out there, even on Capitol Hill.
My kid just said a full day off is vital. So grab those three hours a day anyway and call it two days to yourself.
I fight the handmaiden syndrome, and perhaps you struggle with something similar. There’s a fine line to walk between diva and slavey. That’s where Pilates comes in, to foster righteous ambulation and delivery.
The futurist Buckminster Fuller talked in the Sixties about the ratio between productive work time and administrative overhead. That’s what the fuss was about when Ronald Reagan came into office. Don’t know what the numbers are now, but as I recall, Fuller said that production time was something like, urk! four percent. That’s hard to believe and may be incorrect, but the number was appallingly low, even to my untutored eyes.
At home, the trick is to keep the turnaround time for a given task to a minimum. My household never numbered more than three, and I found that the simplest, lowest tech procedures took the least time, cost the least to execute, and took up the least space. Shopping at stores close to bus stops integrates transportation and procurement, and I find doing so less fatiguing than herding a vehicle around a parking lot and lashing myself in and out of safety systems. Walking around reduces stress and keeps me nimble. Except for meat and produce, I do major shopping one afternoon a month, to keep my agenda sane. I finally figured out that clerical work is top priority, that handling paper is more challenging than doing the thinking those pieces of paper require, and that putting off handling paper is harder than those two tasks put together.
Thanks for letting me read what you've done so far. I just love fresh, locally grown literature.
-30-
-30-
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
