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.

The Feline Redemption of Louis Sullivan

Many a great artist has died in obscurity or, perhaps even worse, found a glorious peak early in life only to face horrific ruin in the final years of life.

Few have embodied this as dramatically and sadly as the great Louis Sullivan. In 1890 when, at the age of 34, he unveiled the Auditorium Building, he was introducing to the world the most tremendous man-made structure on earth up to that time. At 17-stories, it was the world's tallest building. At 110,000 tons, it was the heaviest building in the world and had over eight million cubic feet of space.

When Sullivan died on April 14, 1924, died penniless, his friends coming up with $600 for his funeral and the six months past rent due the Hotel Warner where he whiled away his final days in a small, pathetic room of no architectural distinction. Those who don't believe in a resurrection or an after life need only look at the sudden returning praise of his work after years of being out of fashion and his surviving buildings for which there is a tactile afterlife for his vision and imagination. There may not be a heaven where the dead may go, but Sullivan left behind bits of heaven for those living after he died.

The pathetic last days of his life belie the fact that he did not find ways out of the hell of his final quarter of a century. What is not widely known that cats watch over fallen artists and taken them out of their quandary both in life and afterward. Though suspicious of the international style, Sullivan was no fuddy duddy. He was particularly fond of the work of Jim Flora, who was ten years old when Sullivan died and did not come into his full stride until the 1940s. He had a reputation of drawing hepcats that were cute -- and deadly.

But some nights in the teens and twenties -- and even some nights today when the spirit of Sullivan is feeling blue and in search of inspiration -- the cats come to him and transport him into paintings and rooms filled with the work of Flora. This commercial modernist came to greatest note designing covers of RCA and Columbia record albums primarily after the Second World War, a conflict Sullivan did not have to live to endure.

Though he died at the dawn of the Jazz Age, Sullivan was no square to swing and cool, and many nights he can be found swinging with the cats in some room designed by Flora. The creative spirit may come to mold a tower or sculpture or play or "So What", but more often it is still swinging out there beyond the lifetime of the creator, sometimes capturing the imagination of someone today who has no idea of its source.

Just before he died, Sullivan felt compelled to write a third book, The Autobiography of an Idea in which Louis Sullivan writes of Louis Sullivan in the third person while the idea tells his story in the first person:

"That IDEA which had its mystical beginning in so small a thing as a child's heart, grew and nurtured itself upon that child's varied consistently continuing and metamorphosing experiences in time and place, as has been most solicitously laid bare to view in detail, in the course of this recital. For it needs a long, long time, and a rich soil of life-experience to enable a simple, single idea to grow to maturity and solid strength. A French prover has it that 'Time will not consecrate that in which it has been ignored,' while the deep insight of Whitman is set forth in the line, 'Nature neither hastens nor delays.'

He's Just Not That Into Corbels

Were I to select a mate again, and at this juncture in life I think (hope?) that is very unlikely, a key requirement would be if not a passion at least a respect and tolerance for corbels. In general I like buildings to be clean in design and ornamentation. I make an exception with door knobs (the more grandiose the better) and corbels.

Satan in the Groin, is a site that features rather randy corbels and is a recently discovered pleasure. A day without corbels is like a night without a murky haze.

& Even More

There actually is a blog dedicated to nothing but the &.

Brilliant!

Sans-Serif Sensuality

Do you have a favorite type face? Have you seen Helvetica, the movie? Do you remember German Bold Italic by Kylie Minogue and Towa Tei, one of the few pop tunes devoted to a type face? Has no one other than Salty Miss Jill's husband taken notice of the misshapen art nouveau font of the Junk Thief banner? If you were a type face, would you go out with a font on the opposite end of the serif equation? Do you consider images of typography from the Belle Epoque to the 1950s to hold greater eroticism than fat boys posing as bears or emotionally constipated closet cases who brag about being straight acting or just regular down to earth guys? Are you old enough to remember sending photosensitive paper through a pair of black rubber rollers to produce text waiting to dry and be waxed? Are you given pause when you see stone set dates on the sides of buildings that commemorate the year they were "erected"? Have you ever produced your own fonts with pen and ink purely as a form of recreation? Do you consider Cheap Trick to have greater integrity than Barbra Streisand because the former uses distressed typewriter type and the latter uses Century School Book Italic? Do you consider lower case a to have the same charm as a virginal fawn resting under a fern in the forest? Do you consider the capital R to have the virile strength of a ram proclaiming its domain atop a windy bluff? Do you consider a 0.5 mechanical pencil on a lined boutique press writing journal to be a sensual act equal to that of a bath in a tub of steaming jasmine, sage and lavender? Do you consider Lucida Sans and Arial to be the bastard remnants of the late 1990s? How many versions of the umlaut can you write? When was the last time you carved a letter into a potato and pressed it into food die for not practical reason?

These are questions inquiring minds demand to have answered.