Coming soon: Fall 2010 syllabus and readings

Fall 2010 readings and assignments -- coming soon!

in reference to: Leslie Roberts: Graduate Program in Design at California College of the Arts (view on Google Sidewiki)

Seeing the Forest for the Trees

...I just finished reading Cesar Aira's book (check out the interview in BOMB Magazine's winter/2009 issue)  An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter -- which is a trim 168 pages and boy, what a masterful book. It is the sort of book that makes writers excited to do their own work. Why? Great short books make us feel like there is a chance that we, too, can finish our books -- shorten what we have, tighten, and smarten it up.  And call out, fini! As we are want to do.
...We were in Los Angeles recently (hence the blog silence) partially to tour UCLA with our son who is now 18 and a senior and a year away from sailing off to the Academy, and partially to inspect the Dennis Hopper show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The MOCA show is curated by Julain Schnabel and displayed in a former police garage, repurposed into a museum by Frank Gehry. Sounds promising, no? And indeed it is. The questions it raises, not about the practice of actors taking candid photos of other actors etc, include what will museums "be" as we plough ahead into this century. They still seem inclined towards a specific sort of spatial performance. I'd be curious to see what art looks like with a slightly lower ceiling. Or in a room that has real human presence -- stacks of papers, messy desks, tea cups from yesterday with dregs of tea in the bottom. Surely the paintings and photos came from these humble beginnings? Or do we treat paintings as pageant for reasons that make it much more celebratory and obvious and gives it the feel of "event" as opposed to "looking."
...The final big news from LA stinks of my suburban gawker core: On Saturday I had lunch at Ivy's my delish high school and college friend, Sally Kushner. Kushner texted me from while I was en route: "Check (discreetly) who is at the bar. It's a good one.) The good one turned out to be Javier Bardem. He was seated at an adjacent table. Then Penelope Cruz came in and joined him. They necked and laughed and were very tender. (Not that we were gawking between sips of Pimm's Cup.)
...A few people have been asking when the two books will be "done." Taking a page from Cedar Aira, we are shooting for no more than 200 pages per. And a deadline of December 1.

The Unique Relationship People Have With Trees

(It would be great to report it is not 50 degrees and windy and silver-skied here in the Presidio, but alas, that report would be a lie. But I have made progress in describing the effect -- if you took a piece of heavy, toothed wastercolor paper in a lightish grey, then used India ink to create the outlines and complex structures of trees, then you laid a piece of vellum over the whole thing -- this is my daily view. An Antarctic glaciologist in our acquaintance used to describe being pinned down in a white-out in a tent, "imagine having the car radio stuck between stations, all static, turned up as loud as possible." Imagine this as a visual. Weather caught between stations -- neither sunny nor rainy. Wind steady. A set designers concept for an indie film where everyone looks really tired and bad things happen.)

While we spent Friday cracking into ideas for our first International Institute for Climate Change Art installation (April 2011) -- we took time out to lunch at Limon on Valencia Street  (brilliant ceviche, yum Argentine rose, and charming conversation with our friend Linda, fresh back from Kenya where she documented giraffes)  and  wander into the coolish "pop-up workshop" -- the  nearby Levis workshop. We arrived as the "48-hr" book project was about 12 hours into its life -- lead by one of our Graduate Design students at California College of the Arts -- Zach Gibson.

It's the sort of making environment that puts a spring in the step. Bits of paper and cardboard and chalkboards stuck to the milkshake-white walls featuring alphabets letters epigraphs, etc, meant to make us all want to make stuff and feel better about our oddball lives and the risks and the abandonment of status  -- "all the forces in the world are not as powerful as an idea whose time has come" -- this from Victor Hugo. The print shop features presses more than 100 years old as well as a photocopier, computers, a terrific bashing together of old methods and new. 

Anyone can go in there through the month (they pack up and head Easterly for New York City where the pop-up will be photo based) and make whatever she or he wants. We're going back to make a 'zine on the photo copier.

One of the event organizers, Kevin Bosch, told us there is only one item they will not allow you to produce. Guess.

Give up?

Wedding invitations.

To read: Seth Meyer and John Wells discussing their own unique relationship with trees,  "Finding  New Life (and Profit) in Doomed Trees," (NYTimes, 08-08-10).

The International Institute for Climate Change Art

The International Institute for Climate Change Art met today (Friday, August 6) for two hours at Axis Cafe in San Francisco. The purpose of the meeting was to outline guidelines for submissions for our 2011 show, Naked Antarctica, as well as to delegate tasks.
This is an exciting time for the Institute. Naked Antarctica is our first installation and we anticipate close to one dozen final pieces. Complete details and guidelines will be available on our Web site. We will be inviting artists who have worked in Antarctica as well as those who have not to submit proposals. This will be a collaborative effort, and we look forward to seeing how scientists and artists can collaborate within the context of our map.
Our Web site should be up by early September. Until then, we'll blog about the institute and its projects via theentireearthandsky.blogspot.com.

An Episode in the Life of Landscape Writer + Questions Commonly Asked of Our Life in the Presidio

Remember, we need to sell at least another 500 copies of The Entire Earth and Sky in order for it to go to paperback.
The reader who gives me the best idea about how to push out a snazzy marketing campaign to achieve this wins: An autographed copy of my book. If the idea is really good, I will phone you and read to you from it. If it is a brilliant idea, I will come to your home and cook you dinner and then read aloud from the book. What are you waiting for?


My mind is occupied with the work of Cesar Aira, in particular An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, translated by Chris Andrews and published by New Directions in a neat little format.

Bob Halliday, my dear friend in Bangkok and perhaps the world's foremost authority on both Thai food and coolish fiction, suggested I read it in our recent Skype call.

"I bet there's a copy right now sitting on the shelf at City Lights, waiting for you," he said. And indeed there was a copy on a bookstore shelf and now it is sitting next to me, as I gaze out at the rotting rope hammock in my backyard -- twisted, greenish-ropey gymnast, gone mad in our 52-degree, winds from the SSW at 13 miles per hour days -- (yo! check this out -- I made up those numbers up and went online to check and voila! spot on except for the wind direction -- solid W on that one. Call me a sailor who knows how to read local weather as text -- wind, cloud, humidity.)

Aira's novel documents a moment in the life of Johann Moritz Rugendas. For me, he articulates feelings so clearly about the challenges of framing, decoding, documenting landscapes.

Aira-inspired Thought: While we can work to understand the vertical dimension of The Presidio, the temporal or geologic, the serpentinite, graywacke sandstone, melange, the Monterey cypress and pines, the blue gums, the clarkia and banana slug, when it comes to the horizontal things become more obscure. No amount of study will yield an absolute set of answers. How can words begin to make a picture of the horizontal aspect of this place when what it is and what it claims to be diverge with such a spectacular lurch?

While I read Aira, stories of a landscape painter making sense of a wholly unfamiliar place, I also ploughed ahead into Here Is Where We Walk...now moving towards a finish date of 1 December.

I began making a list of the most common questions asked of us when we tell people we live here and from here we operate The Bureau of Landscape Narrative.

1) How often have you been to the statue of Yoda at the Lucas Film offices?
2) Are you a military veteran?
3) Where do you shop for groceries?

(This last one always makes me laugh. Why, after they lock the gates on this former military base at sundown, there are no trips to the shops. This is why we all have community gardens. So we have something to eat while watching The Real Housewives of New Jersey.)

By the way, the first word of this Aira book is Western and the last word is watch. A writing trick Bob Halliday taught me when we were colleagues at a Bangkok newspaper: First and last words matter. Choose wisely.

Do we each get a daily allotment of words?

I sat with my friend - now a bestselling novelist who appears on national TV - but back then we were all writing obsessively, driven to tell our little stories, and hoping for the best - on a farmhouse porch in Iowa.
It was Halloween and inside the living room shook with dancers decked out in complex, tongue-in-cheek, conceptual costumes. The sort one imagines from MFA students holed up in Iowa trying to get books done -- and using any excuse not to write, such as making the most clever Halloween costume.
We were both finishing MFAs at the university. We were both deep into our first books. The horizon offered the pale orange glow of halogen lights and the fields stretching out before us were turned over, uneven, yet still marked by the neat of rows of monoculture corn estates.
She announced to me that there would be no more emails on a daily basis -- a habit I had come to adore of her -- lively, bright, witty missives, seemingly taken from the Victorians' habit of writing notes and sending them round during afternoon tea.
Her rationale was simple. She believed that each of us only has so many words in us to write each day. Email, she proclaimed, was sapping her strength for the important work, her book.
This statement has been much debated by the two of us and others over the ensuing years. Do we really have a finite number of words each day? Do we drain the supply via email, blogs, and Tweets?

Today in The Presidio the sky, I am dismayed to report, is once again a silver dome. The hawks have been busy since sunrise screeching and diving -- they seem immune to the weather -- putting on a show akin to Jurassic Park scenes, diving, air fights -- all terribly dramatic.
I thought of my friends words and decided to break my usual pattern of "checking in" via iPhone (four calls and three texts await me) and not even crack open email.
If we do have a limited number of words each day -- each year, each decade -- an idea I can argue both for and against -- at least today all the words go to this book, Here Is Where We Walk.

The Complex Relationship We Have with Trees 1

Eucalyptus trees inspire a certain reverence and rage when discussed. Almost no one interviewed to date has been issue neutral on these trees. Those against note the water sucking, plant-destroying root systems, how quickly they proliferate, how they blow up like bombs when ignited in forest fires. Those who adore the trees often comment on their sound and smell...As it turns out, people have had a curiously complex relationship with these trees for some time.


From the Notebook:
Why Blue Gums Were Brought to California

Trees of the genus Eucalyptus from Australia were spread widely and numerously through California after the 1850's.
Several factors favored their spread, notably the production of timber and fuel, often with unrealistic hopes of financial gain. Planting for windbreaks and decorative purposes was also commonplace. An important and overlooked additional reason for the rapid dissemination of eucalypts in California, especially in the 1870's and 1880's, was the belief that trees of this genus, particularly Eucalyptus globulus or blue gum, could prevent or diminish the serious malaria problem that beset portions of the state.
That certain forms of vegetation, especially trees, represented sanitary influences was an ancient notion and it survived even the germ theory of disease. The supposed method whereby eucalypts achieved their healthful influence was through the trees' imagined capacity to absorb or neutralize the noxious gases that were believed to cause malaria. This erroneous and antique miasmatic etiology of malaria, together with belief in eucalypt prophylaxis, was demolished in the late nineteenth century when it was revealed that the disease was caused by blood parasites transmitted by the bites of anopheline mosquitoes.
--
35 The Pacific Rural Press, May 16, 1874, p. 20.

Meanwhile, similar comments were appearing in the authoritative British scientific journal Nature: "The subject of the introduction of the eucalyptus as a sanitary agency in fever-stricken countries has of late been so much talked about that some authoritative preliminary inquiries have been made with the view of planting Eucalyptus globulus on a large scale in Mauritius;"Nature, June 11, 1874, p. 112. "…the Italian government, following the course that it has already adopted on previous occasions, will gratuitously distribute this year 5,000 plants of the Eucalyptus globulus, for cultivation in the Agro Romano, especially in the spot infected by malaria;"Nature, April 1, 1875, p. 436.

Shorelines

We've lived above the Pacific's shore in The Presidio for five years. From the perch here in the dunes, water invites the eye to extend beyond the Golden Gate, out towards the Farallon Islands, and then take an imaginative journey further west -- Hana, Papeete, Moorea -- moving effortlessly across those blue waves. The Golden Gate Strait is three-miles long and one-mile wide and gives its name to the famed orange-oxide bridge. The current runs at healthy 4.5 -7.5 knots, one of the first things we decided to learn about how the sea works in these parts.
Golden Gate as place name was not derived from the sun's color across this water -- particularly in September and October when we can see the golden light. Mais non.
The topographical engineer for the U.S. Army, John C. Fremont, named this place "Chrysopylae" because it reminded him of a harbor near Istanbul called Chrysoceras, or Golden Horn. (A human trait or folly to demand places be "like something else" -- we all seem desperate for analog when it comes to the land.)
For a mighty view of the Golden Gate unsullied by bridge, climb to the highest point in The Presidio: Rob Hill Campground.
It is also a good place to start a meditation on wild, semi-wild, not-so-very-wild places and the sh*t we do there.
Rob Hill is the only campground in San Francisco. It rests on a wind-pounded hill. It has been a source of much hand-wringing here at the head office. Why? Well, the Haas family gave The Presidio about $15 million to fix up The Presidio and the campground was thus reborn.
They took down many, many trees. While they were redoing it, the place looked like a bomb crater. The footprint spreads out like an enormous canker across newly cleared land.
Before, it was a messy, fusty place -- which for some of us is what camping is all about. (Although I have to say, camping in a city is not really my idea of camping. It's something else -- perhaps a new category under the heading 'how we spend time outside.' More on that later.)
So.
With this dim view of the whole fancy-camper operation uphill from our home, we set out each day for Baker Beach, along a road clogged these days with cars and expensive bikes ridden largely by middle-aged white men in extremely tight shorts and tops. Some of these men talk on cell phones, connected to the cell phone via Blue Tooth devices.
We walk along, trying to stay calm in the face of this onslaught of fancy stuff in our beloved park.
On a recent morning, we followed our usual path -- stairs to the beach and then the sand ladder, on this morning packed with children in the last throes of true child-ages -- maybe 10, 11? Most were either Hispanic or African American. Most were not dressed for camping in a way outfitters like REI or Patagonia would recognize. They were dressed for camping the way we all used to dress before expedition clothes became widely available at malls across the world.
Over-sized pea coats, pink shiny windbreakers, ragged sneakers. Laying down each jacket and shoe on a blanket on the sand, then shrieking when blown sand gathered on their coats and other clothes.
We came to see quite quickly it was a group that had perhaps never been to an actual beach. Talking to one of the group leaders, we found out the children came from just across town, a few miles of streets, a million miles away in the neighborhoods that don't make the coffee table books about San Francisco.
The big, fat, overpriced campsite had been their only invitation to explore a beach here, explore with borrowed clothes and all sorts of ideas of what it would be like.
We tarried there, watching the wildish play -- throwing, splashing, running -- that beaches draw out of each of us.
Then, we noted one girl standing alone at the water's edge, carefully pushing her toes into cold waters.
She turned, hands clamped to her head to keep hair from going awry -- a losing battle, we wanted to tell her, but the beach will school her soon enough, so we kept silent -- and she called out to her teacher: It's so loud! I didn't think the ocean would be so loud!
There you have it. A moment when ideas and impressions crack open.
For reasons we have yet to fully grasp, explore, and articulate, this scene made us weep. A story of one girl, wind, sea, and sky, and the day she came to hear the waves.