Posted on by mwhybark

Sprouts

My starter sets are freaking the fuck out in their little hothouse tray. I was thinking I was gonna get ’em in the ground today, but there’s a possible freeze tonight and I decided to skip the digging. Unfortunately, that means that the sprouts will now get a full three weeks in the starter bed, as I will not have time to plant until the second week of April.

I have frantic growth on two varieties of broccoli, two varieties of corn, lettuce, spinach, and some carrots. The carrots are the slowest out of the gate; the corn is the most party-hearty of the batch and I think I may need to move them out of the hothouse lid arena – two more weeks at the rate they are growing will make them into 4-inch shoots at a 90 degree angle.

I was NOT expecting to be dealing with too much of a muchness right out of the gate. Huh.

Posted on by mwhybark

off the cuff

So my friend Andrea messaged me on Facebook wanting my thoughts on a building project in Louisville I hadn’t ever heard of. I ended up kinda going on at length and I thought that my quickie analysis might be amusing. She mentioned Stonehenge as a descriptor in her initial take on the design.

—

http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=127240
– bunch of renderings, better context and diff viewing angles

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H-qhbIIMyk
– pitch film

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisville_Museum_Plaza

At first blush I was reminded of some of the Ground Zero proposals, as I recall there were a couple of linked two-tower ideas. The pitch film seems to give the most context, visually.

I did not find info linking the design of the building to the Ground Zero proposals. BUT:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Prince-Ramus
– “partner-in-charge of the Seattle Central Library”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/arts/design/14pogr.html
– “Joshua Prince-Ramus Leaving Koolhaas’s O.M.A. to Start New Architecture Firm…”

The film clearly links the building to the Library; giant rooms with dedicated uses piled onto one another in ways that presumably reflect and express the use structurally – or so reads the promo literature, anyway.

I like the giant video screen thing as an idea because of Blade Runner, but in real life I HATE video in my field of view when I am driving, even other driver’s little DVD screens distract the shit out of me.

Take my increasingly skeptical opinion of the new Seattle Library:

  • it’s confusing to navigate even when you know it’s confusing;
  • it’s noisy pretty much no matter where you are because of the lack of interior sound baffling and the open insides of the building;
  • it’s hard to understand visually because of the solid intensity of the color schemes of all the interior spaces except for the top-floor reading desks and study carrels and the ground floor.

Looking at that list, the overriding quality underlying each of these critiques is a building that actually emphasizes noise, meaning sensory overload, at the expense of usability. The big video screen on the Louisville building actually takes that problem and expands it into the city itself. I rather doubt that interior of the building would be any more conducive to clear and rational thought.

Oh, look, Prince-Ramus worked on a Guggenheim museum project based in Las Vegas. The aesthetic line I am seeing looks at Vegas’ lines of blinking distraction and robbery machines and casts that as a good and desirable thing. I see it as a mechanism to increase the concentration of power and wealth by making it that much harder for Joe Average to think clearly about his life and role in the economy, something that actually threatens participatory democracy itself.

So, Stonehenge? If Stonehenge is a place of religious spectacle and intoxication, maybe so. I think, however, it’s currently thought to be a sort of astronomical observatory, right? That sort of constructed artifact celebrates the cyclical, the predictable, the knowable, and the real.

These buildings I looked at this morning don’t seem interested in that set of values.

Ha, it’s fun to just come up with stuff like this on the fly!

Posted on by mwhybark

sleepy

For reasons not entirely clear to me, I stayed up too late last night and am very sleepy this afternoon.

Had a happy little lunch today in the ID with Greg, whose film is proceeding apace. Wandered around Uwajimaya for ten minutes while waiting for him, always an interesting experience. I was sort of halfheartedly looking for kooky cellphone charms (am I allowed to call them netsuke?) but didn’t find any.

Posted on by mwhybark

Frank Herbert, 1970

The complete transcript of a 1970 Interview with Frank Herbert and Beverly Herbert by Willis E. McNelly, encountered subsequent to a searchtrawl looking for commentary linking Lawrence of Arabia, the film, with Dune, the novel.

Here’s the bit about Lawrence, near the end, which, I must say, is not a particularly thoughtful or nuanced take on the character of Lawrence as constructed for the film, but which does turn on the idea of Lawrence as akin to the Muad’Dib:

“WM (William McNelly, the interviewer – MW): Oh, I-I caught overtones of Lawrence of Arabia in the thing, for example.

FH: He could very well become an avatar for the… for the Arabs.

WM: Right.

FH: If Lawrence of Arabia had died at the crucial moment of the British…

WM: Say, when Allenby walked into Jerusalem.

FH: Yes. If he had died… if, for example, he had gone up and killed the people who were destroying his breed, walked into that conference and said, Gentlemen, I have here under my javala a surprise, Bang! Bang! Bang! and he had been killed…

WM: He’d have been deified.

FH: He would have been deified. And it would have been the most terrifying thing the British had ever encountered, because the Arabs would have swept that entire peninsula with that sort of force, because one of the things we’ve done in our society is exploited this power… Western man has exploited this avatar power.”

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Lawrence the Third

On Sunday, the League convened for an all-too-rare – although much more frequent in Seattle than most other burgs – screening of the wide-screen amazement device entitled Lawrence of Arabia.

I’ve seen this film three times now in 70mm at the Cinerama, and each time, my head spins for days afterward, usually on new topics. For example, since the last time I had seen this, I participated in a couple of film shoots, and it clearly altered the way I was looking at the film. The clearest example of this was in my electric awareness of the frequent use of one-take shots in the film, shots set up by the film crew with the clear knowledge that the first-take of a shot in a setup would in some way always be visually superior to any subsequent takes.

The best examples of these are in some early shots of the journey to Feisal’s camp, in which Lawrence and his guide traverse sand which has clearly not been previously marked by earlier takes, and in a shot depicting a lost Hadith raider, stumbling across an ‘impassable’ desert just before dawn. As the camera catches the actor, the actual sun appears, camera left but very much in the center of attention, a burning sliver above the horizon. What a shot! It defies the imagination to consider the difficulties the setup poses, and yet it’s clear that the result is wholly worthwhile.

Seeing this again, now nearly five years into the Iraq war, shifted meanings within the film one more time. Now I knew several of the physical sites mentioned in the film as places referenced at one time or another in reportage of America’s campaigns in the desert, not least of which is the name of the film provide for Sherif Ali and Prince Feisal’s tribe, the Hadith. It rings with the sound of a town in Iraq: Haditha.

Watching the film directly after an afternoon spent in the company of Roman sculpture was interesting, too. Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, and Iraq were all under Roman dominion after Pompey’s campaigns, so these places have an arguably closer tie to the culture of Rome and Greece than we do here in the New World. In the film, the characteristically arabesque decorative surfaces and architectural details owe much to the late-period art of the Roman empire.

It should be noted, though, that the film’s interiors were all shot in Spain; while it had been hoped that Jordan and in particular Petra might be used as location scenes, illness disrupted the plans. I’m guessing that informed the choice of the stone city as a location in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

As the League was in attendance, after-film imbibery led to a number of questions and I chased a few down.

Picking up a few threads:

The wikipedia article includes some interesting notes on casting – Marlon Brando was considered for Lawrence, and Laurence Olivier was originally set for Feisal.

Also, I had said that the film was shot in Tunisia (as was some of Star Wars). I was incorrect. The film was set to shoot in Jordan but mostly was shot in Spain and Morocco.

As Lawrence arrives at Feisal’s camp, it is under bombardment by a pair of Turkish biplanes. Much to my frustration, I was unable to ID either the planes actually used by the filmmakers or the model of airplane they had been dressed to resemble.

The planes were DeHavilland 82 Tiger Moths, a 2-seat british trainer of the 1930s, dressed as Rumpler CIVs, sez here.

Finally, for years I have associated the journalist character in the film with Lowell Thomas, correctly (note lower left pic in first section of the page linked to). Here is a link to the Google books result for Lowell’s “With Lawrence in Arabia,” oddly treated as an under-copyright work although it was published in 1924.

For years beyond my certain knowledge of Lawrence, I have associated Lowell Thomas with a Saturday afternoon matinee show shown on WGN Channel 9 Chicago throughout my childhood. I had thought he hosted the show into his dotage. I was entirely mistaken. The actual host of Family Classics was a longtime WGN employee named Frazier Thomas. I still think it’s possible that Family Classics showed Lawrence in a bowdlerized form; the show did introduce me to more than one of the great masterworks of midcentury Technicolor spectacle.