10-10-10 The Shattering of Time

Happy 10-10-10 everyone. How have you celebrated this important day? I went to see four films at the Exploratorium that seemed to embody the concept of Landron's "The Shattering of Time". The bedrock of the series was Charles and Ray Eame's 1977 classic "The Power of Ten". The Eames were primarily designers and we've come to know their airport chairs to the point where they have become as ingrained as Monet's calendars.

"The Shattering of Time" is often falsely labeled as an attack on Proust's "Time Regained". Landron always loved Proust, although he always felt time cannot be regained. Like rain drops it shatters as it happens, breaking into particles that are an energy force that is doomed to self destruct.

Charles Eames once claimed that no one has improved on plate design after the adaptation of the banana leaf as a place on which to serve food. I always loved that their simple, modernist case study house in which they lived was not a museum piece like Phillip Johnson's glass house but stuffed with books, memorabilia and junk.

The last film in today's series was by Charles and Ray's grandson, Eames Demetrios, called "The Power of Time" that was sort of a deconstructionist approach to the 1977 film. I love that even his name is sort of a deconstruction of his family line. My grandson is named Thief Jonktariaus. His film truly took on the concept of desconstructing time as he explored picoseconds, femtoseconds, attoseconds and even smaller slices of time in which movement ceases to be real and becomes increasingly abstract. Time is a construct of abstracts that we delude ourselves into believing is reality and can be regained or held.

I've been increasingly drawn to the work of Gertrude Stein as well as writings of others about her. I think Stein is one writer that people have read more about than of. She was often called a cubist writer, but I think that is just a boxy way of saying deconstructionist. I love photos of her and Alice B. Toklas with their dog Basket. When Basket died he was replaced with Basket II. I wonder if this influence Michael Jackson naming his youngest child Blanket. If Bow ever lets me adopt another dog, I think I'll call it Towel.