Juckstapuzishun
We stopped in mid-air on a dive into chaos a few weeks ago by raising the flag of juxtaposition. This word is on every art critic's short list of words that always apply and should never be used. There is nothing more cliche than pointing out the "obvious juxtaposition" in the artist's use of ... Noise versus silence. Chaos versus order. Graceful elegance versus janky clumsiness. Blobs versus brushstrokes. Light versus shadow. The rules and the breaking of the rules. Intention versus outcome.
Keith Jarrett was scheduled to play a concert in Koln Germany on a winter's night in 1975. When he arrived, the specified Bosendorfer 290 Imperial concert grand piano was not on the stage. A practice baby grand was waiting that was out of tune and with pedals that were not operating properly. He refused to play. ECM records was set to record the show and convinced him to perform by bringing in an emergency piano tuner and showing him the excellence of the recording equipment already in place. He relented and took the stage at 11:30 PM. The high notes were tinny and weak and the powerful bass notes of a proper concert grand non-existent. The recording of the show was released eleven months later. It is the best selling solo album in history and the best selling piano album ever. Give it a listen if you want to hear the musicality of a jazz master's mind at work -- despair, dissonance, joy, wandering until lost, wandering until found and revealed. This work still stands as an epic sonic journey with no map -- the mind of a man playing an hour of whatever danced into his head and hands.
The likelihood of that instrument making the finest piano album in history? Slim to none. And yet...
Juxtaposition, this versus that, the active placing of things next to each other for contrast: the geometry and permanence of the Great Pyramid placed next to the shifting sands of the Sahara; the Talking Heads album "Remain in Light" with the polyrhythms of West Africa and Fela Kuti thrust into the rock and roll of 1980; the king of folk music picking up an electric guitar; the world's largest Gothic cathedral in Manhattan; John Cage's musical composition from 1952 " 4'33"" that is written for any instrument or combination or instruments. It is four and a half minutes of silence. The Eiffel Tower. The Statue of Liberty. Contrast, intentional and sublime.
I'm a human being, roughly 30 trillion cells. Four million are replaced every second. Every cellular division requires the DNA to replicate perfectly. That this occurs with such staggering accuracy is beyond belief. But, perfection in the natural world with numbers this large is beyond possible. Mutations occur. Age drives diversity. Inexact copies appear, but this is also "normal." Juxtaposed to the exact are our genes stumbling forward with mutations, a naturally occuring diversity, which might possibly be beneficial in helping us to heal or weather some new infection for which we have no cellular precedent. Our capacity to grow and heal is organically continually expanding right along with the harmful incursions from without and within. Our own cells mutate into enemies and heroes.
In art, we experience intentional juxtapositions: silence and music, yellow and violet, the Sydney Opera House, Richard Serra's steel slabs and the space between... Outside the realm of human creativity, the universe is profoundly unintentional. Or so it seems. Matter and antimatter, the seemingly infinite frozen darkness versus seething supergiant stars, supernovae blasting the components of life into the void... Random, right? Pure chaos. Or the perfect analog to my cellular mutations. The grand experiment of reality on the scale of the cosmos is running on all cylinders. Create both extremes, all extremes. Ready, set, evolve! Who knows what dreams may come....
P.S. Thank you for your eyes, and especially thank you to the friends who take the time to read these aloud. There is rhythm and pop in these words. They work best when spoken.
P.S.S. There are big changes coming, my friends, to all this, both visually and in text. I have multiple books to publish, which I have been working on for years and fresh artwork to share. Stay tuned. Be sure to open my next missive. Look for it.
P.P.S.S. And, just in closing, might I posit that we, you and I, are the eyes and voice of the universe itself. WE are the juxtaposition to the emptiness, the chaos, the anonymity of comets -- shards of ancient debris drifting through the farthest reaches of nothingness... Which, by the way, is exactly what we are, except we know it.
Juxtaposition Re/Vision
"Chaos: when the present determines the future but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future."
There is a place on the lake where the southern swells bang into the vertical bluff of Red Rocks Park. Picture a remote cliff in Scotland a half mile from my house. Peregrines nest there. The waves rebound from the rock faces angling out into the swells sweeping northward to create a quarter mile field of moving pyramids of water. Wind speed determines the scale of the moguls. Often, they are not navigable on a paddle board. It is chaos pure and strong, a visceral slice of WTF. Skirt that, my friends. Always.
Edward Lorenz, a weather scientist and MIT professor, wrote the above quote after running primitive computer modeling of meteorological systems in 1961. He stumbled, as brilliant minds do, into an entire field of science predicated on the study of havoc, a field of mathematical research of dynamic systems in pursuit of underlying patterns within the seeming randomness. His creation of the field of chaos theory ultimately yielded in 1972 the Butterfly Effect meme, which we all know: "A butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon can create or stop a tornado in Texas."
Miles Davis famously stated, "It's not the note you play that's the wrong note -- it's the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong. " His album "Kind of Blue" is the best-selling jazz album in history. The line-up of his band, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb were given very few instructions, just some themes and scales on paper. The album was recorded in only two sessions in March and April of 1959 with a minimum of takes. In only 46 minutes a new art form emerged -- the modal improvising, the vibe, the accessibility of the blues feel are unparalleled in the history of recorded music. It is a flawless gem of collectively making shit up instantly, creating grace in a few moments in a room with horns and drums and keys and strings. And...
Pause here. I sat down to write to you, my friends, a blog piece on "chaos" and got to this point before realizing that I already did this. Some quick sleuthing brought me here: (link to the blog dated 4/13/2020). As I read through those lines from this vantage of six years in the future, I was struck with its relevance and accuracy summing what I was going to relate for RIGHT NOW. Give that a read and then return to this spot.
By chaos, this is what we mean:
View Untitled Waterlight in motion
View Transverse Projector in motion
View Waterlight in process in motion
OK then. Chaos? Covered. Is chaos persistent? Apparently. Like those washing machine pyramids from a south wind howl. But Lorenz's thinking about how something begins relative to how it ends up nails right on the nose another concept in the chaos arena -- juxtaposition. How something starts can vary dramatically from how it ends. Does the intention make the thing? Or does the thing make itself? And does the process, the act of the making, ultimately determine the result? Did the butterfly flap?
Visually, there is no prior analog for the artwork that Jackson Pollock created starting in the early 1940s. I'm assuming you have all seen his work, (and if you haven't, go now and sit your butt down and breathe deeply and slowly. Pictures of his work are mere shadows of the experience). His fields of colored chaos are without precedent, although his wife, Lee Krasner, was sort of on the same farmland. Pollock painted on canvases on the floor, dripping industrial enamels, flinging paint with brushes and cups, dancing a deliberate body tango to make lush landscapes in space of lines and pops, dots and splatters, sinuous and bristling with languor and lightning, an energy field of movement and tonality. Staring into the dense lacework, one feels an expression of infinite possibility. Randomness exists. Right there. Utter chaos. And it is exquisitely beautiful, although initially, the public and critics were not impressed.
(Side bar: Helen Frankenthaler has an exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in NYC right now until July 3rd. Sublime depictions of lush nowhere).
I have a book of collected images of my work with a brief bit of text with the title "Random Order." I love the oxymorons we stumble upon in life, and this is one that careful ears will recognize. Within the book is a panel named "Photon Sphere" or "Fuzzball". Both names are on the back of the artwork, one slightly pretentious, one honest. I realized after years of making art that no matter how hard I tried, generating true randomness on a panel is inhibited by the mechanics of being a human. It is our nature to find a rhythm when making repeated gestures with our hands, like it or not. AND we are a collection of hinges, with specific ranges of motion. So, I hung a battery-powered mini-grinder with a carbide burr on the business end as a pendulum from the ceiling 18 feet above. I had to tune the contraption with a cardboard wing to dampen the spinning and a block of steel to give it more weight and bite. I turned it on and let it run till the battery died and then repeated the process multiple times until I had the density I wanted in the sphere. To keep the image centered, I had to shift and turn the work table occasionally . Conceptually, the art was making itself, dancing to and fro, a mechanical ballerina with sharp toes doing hours of pirouettes. Random? Exactly. Orderly? Yep.
Listen to "A Day in the Life" from the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper. There are a couple moments where the song disintegrates into utter chaos, an orchestra of swelling dissonance. Then a chord, which sounds suspiciously like my Mac turning on. And the name of the album? Sgt Pepper is a mondegreen between John and Paul having breakfast. Pass the salt and pepper, please. Sgt. Pepper please.
"Quasiperiodic Oscillation" is the name of another book of mine. This phrase is stolen from astrophysics as a description of a rhythmic pulsating signal from a deep space object like a pulsar or a black hole, specifically, a signal with a varying amplitude or frequency or fluctuating phase dynamic. How could something from deep space not have a specific rhythm? Well, neutron stars have been recorded spinning 716 times a second. Or more broadly, how can anything OUT THERE actually maintain ANY rhythm? Chaos large scale? As a reminder, there are 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. There are 200 billion stars in our 'hood, the Milky Way galaxy, which contains an estimated 3.2 trillion planets. There are more planets out there than there are seconds since the Big Bang. Raw chaos materials are abundant.
Closer to home, the Grateful Dead played a song named "The Eleven." The song is in 11/8 time so it never really lands. There is no downbeat so it spins in the air, hovering, circling. On their album "Two From the Vault" released in 1992 of a concert in 1968 is 14 1/2 minutes of this tune with very little singing. Instead, we experience a six-man band making up a song in real time, every musician playing off each other, creating form and rhythm and harmony on the fly, sprinting, converging, disintegrating... Creating order from randomness is the superpower of this band. Dissonance resolution is a speciality.
Formlessness becomes art. OK. But is a butterfly's wing flapping causation or correlation? Did a tornado occur? Or stop? This is part one of a two part exposition and the notion to consider at this juncture is the ordering of the randomness. How does timeless beauty arise from a block of marble, a collection of paint pails, some talented humans some afternoon fifty years ago... What spark? What idea? What notes? What dance moves? AND, once the intention is set, what cracks need to be filled? What wrong notes need to be made right? What bass figure spontaneously changed the direction of the lead solo instantly. Bob Weir, rhythm guitarist for the Dead, once shared in an interview that he would play phrasing that he knew Jerry, lead guitarist and interstellar explorer, would be listening to that was leading to a place of climax that Jerry would anticipate. And when that moment occurred, Bobby would not play the expected moment, just to mess with his buddy. He would be streaking into another idea and grinning.
These images on your screen are samples of my grapples with chaos. Start with a blank, lean in, move my hands, lean harder, move more, turn up the music, double back, until the piece itself takes over and I'm simply in the room wearing headphones and a respirator and safety glasses in a flow state with dangerous tools and tape and sharpies and loudness. The Muse is the boss and I am the minion, the toy of the witches, etching and scribbling marks that can not be erased...
To be continued. Very soon.
I'm printing T-shirts that say
Supernova Remnant
on the front. Who wants one?
Love and hugs and summer sun.
Savor the light. Notice.
Lean in.
B mac
P. S. Yoda said, "Do or do not. There is no try." George Lucas had a movie idea, so he made one. Nice intention. And the result of starting into a process juxtaposed with the result of that project? A single step, a note on a napkin, a phone call... A Star Wars movie just came out this week, 49 years ago almost to the day from the first one. As they say, "Stay tuned!"
P. P. S. Juckstapuzishun. Use the Force.
Joy Addition
I am veering way out of my lane here, and I hope that it is just a tiny jolt of awakening and not a reason to tell me to get lost. Although, I have been lost in the woods, and not just once. Notably, Belvedere mountain -- bikes, a disappearing road, no map, no phone, bushwhacking a beaver pond lined with bungee stakes... What are your favorite lost stories? That's not rhetorical.
In 1919, if you wanted to travel from New York to London, you might book travel on a lighter than air ship, a zeppelin. This was the most modern way to traverse the Atlantic. Fifty years later, we were standing on the moon. Fifty years.
As a teenager I saw a lot of rock concerts including the band Yes. They performed at a Civic Center in West Virginia with a stage set of lighted-up fiberglass shapes based on the artwork of Roger Dean. (Look him up). For the finale, red laser beams shot out of the front of the three heads of the blobular sea monster static contraption dangling above the band. Very trippy and bizarre. Last year I saw a show at the Sphere in Las Vegas. Jump on over to YouTube and type in "Dead and Company, Sphere". The concert venue in Las Vegas cost 2.3 billion dollars and required a crane from Belgium to erect. The exterior is covered in a 580,000 square foot LED array that is the largest ever. The interior boasts a 160,000 square foot video screen with the highest resolution display on the planet with over 2.5 million pixels that happens to be acoustically transparent so the 157,000 speakers mounted behind can work their magic. The amplifiers and processors and drivers and cables weigh over 395,000 pounds. Suspended overhead. There are no pillars holding up the roof of the 10" thick concrete skin over a geodesic tension structure. Wave field synthesis is achieved using the beam forming capabilities of HOLOPLOT X1 arrays for the creation of virtual origin points utilizing pulse-width modulation, power factor correction and subwoofers. Sound comes out of the floor too. Yep, fifty years. Blinking lights and fiberglass to this. It requires a run-on sentence to explain.
In Beijing last year, a half marathon was opened to robots. They ran in a separate lane from the human competitors with the fastest finishing in 2 hours and forty minutes. The world record for people is 57 minutes and 20 seconds, set by the Ugandan, Jacob Kiplimo a month ago. Last Sunday, a 5 1/2 foot tall robot named Lightning won the race in 50 minutes and 26 seconds. That took a year. So, how fast is technology advancing? Netflix took 18 years to accumulate 100 million users. Twitter took five years. ChatGPT took 10 weeks. Meta's Threads took 2 days.
Drone warfare? Boston Dynamics and their synthetic humanoid that can turn backflips? Chinese dance troupes of robots? A 7,598 drone aerial display of a dragon flying... This is the image to carry us forward -- a flying dragon -- the absolute bleeding edge of technology used to create something that is mythological that we don't need. Cool, yeah but, whoop de do...
What do you need? What would make your day or month better? I am not going to throw out suggestions and possibly skew your thinking. Just make a short list in your noggin or write it down somewhere, like the fridge or tattooed on your left hand. Now, let's band together and speak up. How to make things better seems like a stance worth reviewing daily.
Let's do it.
And of course, buy art right now. That makes things better for you AND me and your heirs. If you don't have any, museums take donations every day.
Peace and love y'all.
B mac
P.S. Can't resist: sunshine, sweat, concert tickets, sunshine, fresh water out of that well right there. Art openings. A bike tune up. Cheese. That guitar tone in "Le Serviette Noir." The moon when you can see the whole disc and it's a new moon. Need more of that bass line bounce in "Queen of California " live. The debate between northern harrier and sharp-shinned. A quiet knee. Maple syrup. More coffee. The stranger asking what I think is so funny. Open doors. Waterfalls. Did I mention sunshine? A rainbow, even a small one. Twilight light.
P.P.S. By 1970 the number of nesting pairs of bald eagles in the U.S. was around 450. In 2020, the bald eagle population stood around 320,000 birds. Fifty years. Let's do this.
P.P.S.S. Fifty years ago we got Joni Mitchel, Jackson Brown, Stevie Wonder, Return to Forever, Zeppelin, Bob Marley, Eagles, Rush, Boston, the Ramones, the Centre Pompidou, the CN tower, Anselm Keifer, Gerhard Richter, Cindy Sherman, Mapplethorpe, Christo's Running Fence (all 24 miles of it stretching to the coast in California), Walter De Maria's Lightning Field, Matta-Clark...
What does Led Zeppelin have to do with robots? Art persists. 500 years ago (10x50) was the era of Michaelangelo and the High Renaissance -- Dürer, Pontormo, Da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, Bramante... Science progresses and technology leaps, constantly eclipsing itself. Art endures as the vision of an era, a time, a moment of humanity transfixed, a permanent monument of culture.
OK, I'm way out of my lane and can't stop. Structure be damned. What do we need? What do we want? Cancer cured. No bombing. Solar panels on every house even if the state has to buy them. (Why not? We are the richest nation in the history of civilization). Bigger national parks. Free education and teachers' salaries doubled. Brotherhood/sisterhood. Global women's rights. Tolerance. Neighborliness. Free healthcare for everyone. (Yep, all babies need attention regardless of their tan). Elder care. Organic food. Exercise as a prescription. Clean air. Term limits. Sanity. Constitutional amendments to guarantee democracy for this nation. Alliances. Handshakes and hugs. Peace. And love. Mostly that last thing. Do that. Now.
Whew. If we can bring back a bunch of birds, we can sort this. Don't try to prove me wrong. It won't work.
Before, Now, then After
Lightsabre, light speed, packing light, lights and darks, morning light, twilight, light at the end of the tunnel, headlight, light winds, green light, light day at work, charge of the light brigade, incandescent light, light up display, nightlight, northern lights, light housekeeping, cold light of day, limelight, come to light, light bulb, in a new light, lighten up, light aircraft, sunlight, light snow, lamplight, light the fuse, punch the lights out, ray of light, street light, light blue, see the light, light steps, last light, light on outta here, moonlight, light as a feather, the falling light, daylight, flashlight, red light, blinded by the light, ceiling light, light touch, firelight, highlight, fading light, enlighten, light of my life ...
Once this concept works into your consciousness, it is everywhere. Welcome to my obsession. The above are just off the top of my head. No googling or homework. Just "light the fire" and .... Half of the above are names given to pieces of artwork I have done over the years, but the others now have to go on my list of potential names. Notice too, the emotional weight of so many of the above phrases. Poetry in two or three syllables. Moonlight. Light of my life... I live in a house of light, everyday.
Wait, house of light. Lighthouse. Yep, that one has been on the list for years and finally, I have brought it to light. Er, life. This panel features a lighthouse, that guardian of the coast charged with steering voyagers home to safety. A few years back, I made a piece called "Superior Gyroscope" thinking of this as a life hack, something that each of us could use to navigate, stay upright, on fleek, as it were. We all need that. This piece on your screen is of a beacon, a bright thing used for guidance through storms and fog and darkness. We could all use one of these, and metaphorically, I'm sure many of you already have one. Something brilliant and steadfast, oscillating endlessly with a timed pattern of flashes to let you know you are on course, a metronome of illumination to show you what to avoid -- the rocks here -- and where there is safe passage home. Small at a distance, but bright. Turbulent seas be damned.
The title is a simple "Before, Now, then After." This piece is also about time and the way we parse everything in an orderly three part framework that strangely resets every morning when we get out of bed. Lights out. Darkness. Morning light. The cycle continues; the lighthouse pulses.
Happy spring my friends. It's fiercely late this year. Snowed five inches on the hill on Tuesday night. Still looking for buds. The lake has already warmed to 37 degrees. Yay. AND yet, the sunlight is stronger and hotter on the face every day; the explosion of green is nigh. AND this paragraph is a metaphor. We got this. We will blossom soon.
Buy art my friends. It keeps the lights on around here.
Peace and love and hugs,
B mac and Sarah V
P.S. There is another long list that speaks of light without using the word. We will save for later: glimmer, sparkle, glisten, dusk, dawn, gleam, fade, brighten, illuminate...
P.P.S. I have always liked the notion of light as something more than an intangible. A light pile would be like a woodpile. A bowl of light. Shoveling light. Packing light. "Light Box" is a 5' x 10' piece of mine in a house in Florida. "Intangible Something" is another that size, also in Florida.
Light Pushers
I live in Vermont. Years ago I was swimming in an abandoned quarry, and as I was clambering out, my foot brushed against something that wasn't a rock or a stick or weeds. I fished around and pulled out a bowl-shaped metal object covered in the green slime of time underwater. Once home, I rinsed and scrubbed the debris off the surfaces to discover a low conical-shaped disc of metal with attached balls or knobs. The metal was fantastically thin and yet stiff and had a finish coloration that made no sense. From one angle, it is blue, from another green and, when resting on a table top, from across the room, it is violet. There were also subtle markings etched into the surface. I was younger with a family and put the bowl in a box in the basement. Recently I moved; the kids are grown up. And I pulled this thing out of the box...
I took it to an archeology professor at Middlebury College who said it could be old but doesn't match any cultural artifacts she knows of. She sent me to a friend in the physics department who sent me to a colleague at MIT who is a physical materials scientist, which yielded speculation about composition -- metallic, but no specific matches with known alloys, possibly an allotrope in a crystalline phase, but nothing he had ever seen before. Conclusions: phenomenal strength and stiffness, ultra-light weight, unknown surface finish that appears to be the material itself as opposed to some plated or painted coating. As I was leaving, he confessed to never encountering an object like this in his lab in forty years of research, and we should be open to the possibility that it is not of terrestrial origin.
I went back to the quarry as soon as the ice melted off with a mask and snorkel after doing some homework on the quarry. It is hundreds of feet deep and hasn't been in operation for 177 years. In two afternoons of holding my breath for all I could stand, I found nine more "plates." The largest was the deepest and I was only around fifteen feet down. After cleaning, I found they were all different in "finishes" but fall into four sizes, so far. One is cut into as though damaged in a fire, but the others are nearly pristine, no denting, no corrosion. They defy explanation as to purpose. One feels like a map. One a color photograph of a deep space nebula. One a device or part of a device like a microfiche or memory storage. The sense of them to me is possibly something to do with navigation, but a couple seem to be imaging atomic structure or energy fields. They also have a sense of time, though this could be my personal reaction to their presence. I am going back with a diver thanks to a grant from NEMOCA, the New England Museum of Contemporary Art. Scientific academia, at this point, is not interested in funding research into inexplicable artifacts. We are cataloging, numbering and photographing each of these objects for a comprehensive documentation of this project we are calling "Cosmic Debris." The objects are offered for sale after our measurements and imaging to help fund future research. We will publish a book on the data and photographs.
OR
Bowls of Light
What you are looking at are sculptures made of 99.9% pure titanium, brass and stainless steel with a dash of chrome plating, but the essence of the object, the heart of the art, is light. The colors on the surface of the titanium are created by wavelength interference. With a torch, or voltage in an electrolytic bath, I form a layer of a clear oxide on the surface of the metal that is 30 to 55 nanometers thick or roughly .0000016 inches thick. Light bounces off the surface of the clear oxide layer and light bounces off the surface of the metal and this millionths of an inch differential creates a spectrum of color depending on the thickness of the film. There is no pigment or paint or dye. The color is pure light. Paint produces color through the absorption of particular frequencies. What you are seeing is exactly the same as the spectral color of a blue Morphos butterfly's wings or a soap bubble, the iridescence of a hummingbird's livery or the liquid spectrum of an oil film on wet pavement. The low cone shape of the bowl is designed to make this microscopic film generate a shifting range of different colors depending where the viewer stands. This bowl of light can appear blue or green or violet all at once. Or pink and yellow or gold or silver. The fierce purple overlaid on an electric yellow is purely light manipulation. This is physics at work. And our eyes, in all their miraculous functioning, struggle to make sense of what you are seeing. Photographs are pale shadows of the experience itself. If you could see this object in a darkened room it would be gray. These sculptures make the ephemeral permanent. The sculpture is not the piece of metal.
We have named this project "Cosmic Debris" and each sculpture is numbered, photographed and will be documented thoroughly with a book. They are all one of a kind. They are physically impossible to reproduce. Like you.
Bowls exist to hold "things." These bowls exist to push light.
If one were to "push light," would that make it go a tiny bit faster? Faster than light, so backwards in time. Stay tuned. I will get back to you yesterday.
Peace and Love,
Truth is Beauty is Magic,
B mac
P.S. Be aware that what you are looking at is the only one you will ever, ever see like it.
P.P.S. Each bowl comes with a wall hanger that permits one to show either side of the cone.
Really Now?
Really now? What is the point of typing all this stuff? It's simple. I'll explain in a moment.
In Costa Rica a couple years ago, there was a line of leaf cutter ants in the night delivering their goods back to some palace and their queen. (Ants have queens, right?) In the busy marching thousands came pinkish purple pieces of a blossom. Flower delivery. Yep. Some ant was getting something special. Maybe it was Valentine's Day in the ant universe.
We, every last one of us, need a constant reminder to love better. Love better yourself -- the voice in your head reading this and weighing it and judging whether it's worthy of your time. THAT. That voice needs to remind the thing that is listening to that voice to ease up, lean in, you got this. Love your body and all its weirdness of your shoulder or knee or back talking to that thing between your ears. It is, after all, the astronomically absurd machine we live inside, AND every freaking day we open our eyes is the big miracle. Show that knee a little extra love. Your back doesn't want to hear you complaining about it. It wants love, recognition, some attention.
Love better those close to you, and you find out how to do this by asking. Get out of your looping head and lean in to the ones you care about the most, and consciously find out what they need that you can provide. Sometimes just expressing the curiosity is all it takes. Likely though, very likely, it is a list, maybe a long one, that could be addressed. Every one of us can be better. Moi, I am working on it. Honestly, what is more important than this?
Then there's the jump: Love better the inanimate, or seemingly inanimate, world around you. Stop rushing by that picture hanging in the hall. Pause for a moment to consider that piece of art that you see everyday as just part of the room. Somebody poured herself into that. Who? Why? My particular obsession is the way light moves, the way we see it, its subtlety and dynamism, in constant flux. Sunlight on the snow in the air this morning at six below. Anodized titanium in the shop last night looking just like a hummingbird's shimmering. And then, stop on your walk, hike, snowshoe, sandy toes stroll. What can you hear? A tree creaking trying to tell you something. The sssshhhhhhh of the sand as the wave retreats, resets to rumble again and then ssshhhhhhh....Think swapping the background to the foreground. The subtleties that you are overlooking need looking over.
Bob Weir died a couple weeks ago. The outpouring of love in the musical community is a tsunami of Love. Sixty years of playing guitar to the dancing humans at Dead shows, Ratdog shows, Kingfish shows, The Other Ones, Further, Bobby and the Midnights, Dead and Company, Bob and the Wolf Bros, Bob and Rob Wasserman shows... Has any performer in history played to more listening ears? Nope. Bob is the bashful king of musical grace. What has to be the defining ethos of his life? It's a simple phrase and the one that will return this country to who we can be in a higher state. I am waiting for the politician to step forward and lead with the platform of Peace and Love. It is the solution and it can't be diminished by any objection. Bob stepped onto a stage when hippies and the Peace and Love movement poured into our culture, and he lived a life of endless munificence ever since.
This is a process of turning inside out -- you show yourself some love and then expand it to immediate family and friends and the world where you walk and the kids making a ruckus and peeps dancing to the band and the friends holding up the signs and the people who really, really need some help...
I sat down to write this morning about rock and roll and art and the blues and then this happened. No apologies. I'm voting for the Peace and Love ticket whoever starts waving it around. And I will continue to remind my friends to slow down and smell the flowers, even the flakes of ones carried through the darkness a half inch off the dry forest floor by bugs. This is your only chance.
For real,
Do it today,
B mac
P.S. Speaking of ants, do you know about anting? Yep, the verb. Some birds, members of the Corvus family in particular, (you know, the ones with the sly minds), find ant hills and stand over them with their feathers out stretched. The angry ants swarm over the birds or the birds pick up ants and rub them all over their bodies. Apparently, ants secrete formic acid and other chemicals that fight against parasites and bacteria. I'm thinking we humans need to come up with some analogous maintenance behavior rooted in the natural world. Maybe cold plunges. Maybe hot springs. Maybe sound bathing in front of wailing musicians. Rolling in grass. Ocean swimming. Flower gardens. Please Mother Nature, we need help.
P.P.S. My granddaddy was born Christmas Day, 1900. He lived through the First World War, the Spanish Flu that killed two to three percent of all human beings, the Depression, World War Two and the Holocaust, the Korean War, the Cold War, civil rights marches and assassinations, Vietnam. His favorite thing to say to everyone was, "You are wonderful."
Don't hold back.
P.P.S. He also used to call me and my brothers, "Skookerinkus." I still have no idea what that means. Anybody?
P.P.S.S. Bobby, thank you. Force of nature, the other one, we are heartbroken but you left us the medicine. We will survive.
The Edge of Darkness, the Bodyguard, and Why We Exist, Briefly
The Solstice occurred last night at 10:27 PM EST at the same instant for the entire of planet Earth. Clockwork. The binary shift of longer nights to longer days just happened.
But sometimes things present in threes. Right on right on right on... Like those small dots that ended that sentence.
If you have a big brother, raise your hand. Big sisters count too, but the brother variant can have a bit more heft from sheer physical force. We are going to lean into that. Having an older sibling means there is someone looking out for you. If you are a single child, you may get the same effect from your dad or an uncle, as it's stereotypically an older male figure in this role. This person has your back. How many movies have you seen with the big bro leaning in to a potential future with the line of "Don't you even think of _____." It's macho, probably textbook male aggression; but it is the nature of family dynamics and has been for centuries. You have a protector, a bodyguard.
Comet Shoemaker Levy-9 was discovered in 1993. In passing by Jupiter on its long parabola around the sun, it was torn apart by Jovian gravity and captured to orbit our largest dance partner. Jupiter has more than twice the mass of all the other planets combined. Having the strongest magnetic field and the greatest tidal field in the solar system, it boasts 95 moons including Ganymede, the largest moon we have in the neighborhood and bigger than the planet Mercury. As the colossus in the 'hood, Jupiter is a fast-spinning gas giant covered in storms of immeasurable violence. The Great Red Spot is a cyclone that has been raging for at least 350 years tearing through an atmosphere of ammonia, water vapor and methane with no solid planetary surface; although scientists believe now that there may be a core of metallic hydrogen (!?). I have a three-part photograph from an amateur photographer that I bought around 1995 that shows the dance of obliteration of Shoemaker Levy. Twenty-one fragments of the comet impacted the planet's surface in 1994 creating fireballs and debris fields some of which were larger than Earth and persisted for months. Yep, Jupiter, king of the Roman gods, is a massive freak, and our big brother.
Jupiter deflects asteroids and comets, slinging them away out of the solar system entirely or capturing and devouring them. Hence the 95 moons. And hence the enormity of our big bro, a result of billions of years of absorbing space debris. Life on earth is a result of billions of years of stability. No planet killers have made it here, although the Cretaceous Period was ended 66 million years ago by a meteorite hitting the Yucatan. Life stumbled, and then roared back with even greater diversity. So, big brother let one by, and the result is us and birds and butterflies and basil and Beaujolais.
And now the third part. Big brother Jupiter is devoid of life. How do we know? Because we can think, observe, do math, test. We are self aware. AND exactly, who is the "we"? I am writing to you and you are reading about science stuff. But we are nothing but space dust assembled by randomness into a mind that can consider considering. My DNA unraveled and laid end-to-end would reach Pluto and back. And what assembled this insanely unlikely string of chemicals but time and stability for it all to come together. WE are the universe itself coming into consciousness. Does ANYTHING exist without our looking at it? Is there a universe without US? A strong case can be made that until our brains evolved into having this exact discussion, there is only pure nothingness. Light, rocks, dust, radiation seething across the void... Somehow the nothingness wanted to know itself. Here we be.
It's the solstice. Light returns and darkness diminishes. It's a metaphor many are clinging to right now. A pivot toward brighter days. It's also a symbol of the emergence from the dark, the knowing replacing the unknown.
Hug each other. The universe decided families are crucial, obviously. Big sisters and big brothers got your backs. A little holiday of lights, a little Christmas magic... We are the luckiest atoms as far as our telescopes can see...
Love and more love my friends. Please buy art made of light. It's a reminder of our ephemeral nature AND an anchor in our perceptual reality. Art can be a friend too. Take this time of year, the emergence back to the light, to celebrate with those siblings, the ones who keep an eye on you. Light a candle. Hang up some lights.
Havoc is here for you.
Shining.
Blessings from me and Sarah the Fifth. We got your backs too.
P.S. In Ireland is Newgrange, a one acre mound built by Stone Age farmers around 5,200 years ago. At dawn on the winter solstice, an aperture sends a beam of light down the passage leading to the center of an underground chamber. A thousand years older than Stonehenge, this is an agrarian culture's clock, a calendar, defining time with stones and dirt. They didn't know that they were made of supernovae elements. They certainly had no clue about DNA or Pluto. But self aware? They share that with us. Fifty two centuries ago, people with mostly my DNA were focused on light. Let's keep the ball rolling. We are the universe itself, seeing itself.
Say Something Once, Why Say It Again
Hi friends,
When you look up the word "totality" in an online dictionary, the definition states "something that is total or constitutes a total; the total amount; a whole." And, "the state of being total; entirely; all." And lastly, in astronomical terms, "total obscuration in an eclipse." Pardon me, but these definitions suck. That's like saying something is awesome that causes awe. Or "everything" is just all things, every thing. This is a perfect example of a "tautology," from the Greek "tautologia" meaning "repetition of something already said."
And thus, here is a link to my Totality blog from June of this year in which I cover the items below with a bit more flair and Shakespearean reference material. THIS, however, is the short and sweet and has a bonus ending:
On April 8th of last year, I stood on the shore of Lake Champlain with a crew of good friends watching a solar eclipse. The moon's shadow was devouring the sun on a Spring afternoon. Our sunny day was getting darker and colder by the minute. I put on a long sleever and peered through my welding goggles that I brought from the shop. Everyone around me was acting anxious, chattering or withdrawing, playing with their paper and plastic eclipse glasses. There was almost no actual sun left. I looked west across the lake to a wall of blackness rushing across the water at 1500 miles an hour. A wall of nightfall. Twilight replaced day. Stars came out. A sunset of redness ringed the horizon. Stars appeared. Fell cold fell. The color drained from everything. Silence took over the landscape. Our little gathering was tainted; evil exists. Here. Some cheered for a moment. Some wept. The sun was gone, replaced by a black hole in the sky ringed with a thin line of whiteness, light devoid of warmth, light without color. This is celestial, profound, lovely, and yet primal, terrifying. In a moment, the constant foundation of reality of night following day was murdered. For three minutes and sixteen seconds, our world broke. If there is an apocalypse, it starts like this... It feels very, very bad. Were I a shepard on a plain 10,000 years ago...
And then, my lizard brain let go, and I realized that this is not the end. It just kinda feels like it. But, and, it is beautiful to see the corona around the sun, a normally invisible veil is alive and right there. Shining.
This artwork named "Totality" is meant to represent this experience, the otherness, the strangeness, the stark perception of light and dark all at once. I have been making light sculptures for twenty-five years, squares and rectangles. This piece is circular. A five-foot diameter depiction of a moment in life as primal as witnessing the birth of my sons. NOTHING is like a total solar eclipse. It takes metaphor to manifest the experience. The definition in the first paragraph is a classic example of the failure of words. Totality is not like a great movie or an awesome sunset. It stands outside and apart. Ask anyone who has seen one. And partial eclipses or lunar eclipses don't cut it. Annie Dillard wrote, "...Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane."
We are planning to exhibit "Totality" at the SCOPE Art Fair during Art Basel Miami the first week of December. This is an opportunity to purchase this piece before the show. I am doing an edition of two. This is number one. As always, my pieces are irreproducible; number two will be similar, but unique. The price is $18,000. It will be more at the show.
Cheers to the team.
I recommend going back and reading the original blog if you missed it.
Rock Steady,
B mac
P.S. "Total obscuration" is not even accurate. Yes, the sun was gone, but not. The corona was still visible and it is indeed part of the sun. The surface of the sun, the photosphere, is 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit . The corona, a thousand miles above the surface, is a million degrees Fahrenheit.
P.P.S. It is not lost on me that this object feels very much like a human eye. This is all about seeing. Everything is about seeing, really seeing.
P.P.S.S. So, back to the top. Repetition. "Joy in Repetition" is a Prince song that I highly recommend. The point here is this is an opportunity, right here, today. Two will be made and only two. Do it now. The next total solar eclipse visible in the U.S. will be in 2044.
Convergence
Mostly these missives are about connections, stories that demonstrate how the universe and us two-legged animals are bound together in a waltz of light and thought and biology. The last one a month ago drew parallels between big-brained mammals, us included, that aren't so apparent and yet are foundational to the strengths of generational knowledge. Shared memories... story telling... generational bonds...
I'm kind of a jam band guy. I was listening to the Allman Brothers on my Dad's stereo. First album I ever bought was Yes "Fragile." (I know, prog rock teen). Second was "Woodstock." I knew I liked musicians who were masters of their tools. My father worked the concert doors at the University with his pals from the English department for fun, so my brothers and I saw The Who on their Tommy tour, ELP, Clapton, Sly and the Family Stone, Ike and Tina Turner, Marshall Tucker, The Doobie Brothers, Rod Stewart, Peter Frampton... I saw my first Grateful Dead show with 150,000 people at Englishtown raceway in NJ in '77 with my brother Andrew. I took Andrew with me to see Yes play in Charleston, WV; and when I recently looked up the date of that show, I discovered that somehow my Mom had let me take the VW Bug three hours over the mountains when I was fifteen with a learner's permit with Andrew to see laser beams and Roger Dean's art house stage set-up with Rick Wakeman and Chris Squire blazing away at maximum everything. It was epic. Andrew was 14.
In Philly, in college, I saw the Dead, Zappa, Return to Forever, The Boss, Santana, and Bob Marley from the second row. I've seen shows in New Orleans, Red Rocks, Nassau Coliseum, racetracks, fairgrounds, MSG, Saratoga Springs, The Warfield, The Fox, Roach's, Memorial Auditorium, Providence, San Jose and the Sphere... The Red Hot Chili Peppers wearing socks. Lenny Kravitz with no shirt and skin tight leather pants, Talking Heads, Violent Femmes, Zappa playing "Whipping Post" in Montreal, Phish...
And I have the stories to go with them: Lost ticket stub so I had to jump down from a ten foot wall to rejoin my peeps; Jorma coming on stage six and a half hours late, playing at 11 on his amp while scooping some white powdery stuff off his Mesa Boogie between songs and drinking out of a vodka bottle (My ears rang for two days; sometimes they still ring); Buddy Guy retelling the same tale between songs; George Clinton in full seventeen piece fury stomping the cosmic funk; Jerry blowing the audience into shreds of ecstasy; Pat Metheny playing religion -- the good kind. This could go on ... Rickie Lee, English Beat, Miles Davis from the second row, Jazz Fest and "Blue Sky" and an ice cold beer saving my soul...
But why now? Convergence. Two nights ago on the waterfront with a flawless sunset to our backs, we stood in the mayhem of rapt and shaking humans while the band Goose pumped their brand of airborne electricity into our ears. They are the newest in the realm of collective improvisation -- excellent musicians making it up on the fly with the drummer sprinting, keyboard chords held to the floor, bass man playing the rhythms of sub-Saharan early man while the guitarist solos in piercingly, perfect synchronicity. Elevate. Then, elevate, then... I was there with my brother who telepathically communicates, especially around music, and his son, and my son. Two generations standing together -- young men in their mid twenties and us grey hair teenagers. Genetics as close as they get. Communication. Communion. In concert.
This is what ART is about. My dad took my brothers and me to Stonehenge, to the Louvre, and to see Count Basie. We listened to Handel and Dave Brubeck and Brahms and Segovia on his turntable playing through colossal speakers he brought back from England. And there I was with my son and Kev and his son on the waterfront in the sonic tsunami, loving life.
Following up the last missive I shared, whales sing to their children and grandchildren. Elephants speak in subsonic frequencies of how the planet works and where the water is, leading the younger generations. I tell stories and my boys roll their eyes, but I will repeat them. The significance has to do with their rehearsal. Value endures in the utterance. Killer music has to be shared repeatedly. The virtuosos in the world deserve our attention and attendance. Our humanity balances on this focus of expression and continuation. As I said before, go see live music outside. AND take your kids.
In the art realm, I am starting a series based on concerts. Stay tuned.
And
Stay tuned.
Love and hugs,
Get outside in these shortening days.
The light is still strong. B mac
P.S. Did anyone notice the word above with nine letters and one vowel?
P.P.S. "Tell us a little bit, but not too much." Feel free to send me lyrics that resonate through your lives. I quote the Dead's Robert Hunter lyrics constantly and occasionally get a raised eyebrow. Last Saturday I was on the lake at sunset, paddling on my SUP. "Estimated Prophet" was cranking away on my ear buds. The sun shot through a hole in the clouds to illuminate a pool of lava over by the western shore. I turned to paddle directly thataway. The sun lowered and blazed across the surface exactly when the lyric sang, "like an angel, standing in a shaft of light." True story. Convergence.
The Largest Brains, the Lowest Notes
Ask any kid about the largest animal and they will likely blurt "Elephant.” If a bit older, they could suggest that the dinosaurs are the largest creatures ever. Being grownups, mostly, we know that the blue whale (Balaenoptera Musculus) is the correct answer. Its tongue weighs as much as an elephant. At 100 feet long and up to 400,000 pounds, it is the largest creature in all of our planet's history. We could swim through its veins. They eat a quarter million calories in a single bite. Where do they live? Everywhere. In summers they feed near the poles and then winter and breed in the tropics. One of my brothers tells the tale of paddle boarding off Monterey and having a pod surface to swim alongside, blowing hot, snotty, fish-stinky plumes. He tells of a sense of safety and security with these massive mammals along on the trip, removing his paranoia about great white sharks in the area. As paragons of life on earth, whales rule. They sing to each other over hundreds of miles using frequencies that travel in salt water up to 10,000 miles. Their society is matriarchal. Read the scripts from divers and researchers and they all resonate with profundity, age, intelligence. Whales also experience menopause.
So do elephants. And humans. And great apes. What is that about? Human females biologically live longer than males. What is the evolutionary advantage of that? Elephants live in large family groups generally led by the oldest female. They age out of reproductive capability, but continue as the most experienced members of their tribe. They lead. Queen Elizabeth II ruled for nearly 70 years. The average lifespan of a blue whale is 95 years. My Aunt Dee is 100 years old and sharp as the proverbial tack.
Somehow the wisdom of the natural world decided that the hazard of death in childbirth was too great a loss to the communal intelligence. Menopause is the solution. Let's keep these grandmothers and great grandmothers around as long as possible and, forgive me if I'm overstepping, but it might be wiser for some of the current crew of older males to be demoted to the JV squad bench. Just observing the natural order of things, my friends. I'm far from an expert on pretty much anything.
Right? What do I know? Seems to me that some of the older males of our species should be paying a little more attention to the older moms. Might be a little less bombing and a little more day-care funding. Maybe AI will be able to sort out whale language and our global intelligence will expand. Research in this field is ongoing by impressively dedicated scientists dropping buoys with microphones into whale pods as fast as they can. Let's raise a toast to the humans working to understand the complexities, the languages and interdependencies in our biome. John Muir said, " When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."
What does this have to do with art? Art fixes in one place some sort of a thing, whether it's colored goo on canvas, a group of sounds you love to sing with, an object out on the lawn that says "YO, pay attention!" Can't say it any simpler. My art is begging the viewer to recognize the insane capacity of us to perceive and comprehend electromagnetic frequencies in the human visual field, roughly 380 to 740 nanometers or, said another way, 405 trillion Hertz to 790 trillion Hz.
Blue whales can hear 7 Hz sound waves up to 220,000 Hz. Elephants don't have the benefits of water to carry sound but they can hear 14 Hz to 12,000 Hz up to six miles away. The lowest frequencies they can detect through their feet and trunk with enough precision to triangulate the direction of the sound miles away. I have shared repeatedly the specifics of our superpower of vision.
Art is a sustained chord. It is a monument. It is a distillation of information. It is what long term memory does. It captures information and holds it. It can be wisdom frozen to refer to again and again. What our grandmothers know and their parsing of the value of the information is the essence. Art is the fossil remains of data. Wisdom is functional art.
Biggest. Oldest. Fastest. Data.
Art is the storytelling behind the facts. Listen to the elders, especially the grandmothers. They know meaning more than facts. Old wive's tales are the basis of humanity's collective consciousness. Humans write, record. Elephants ponder and follow the wisest. Whales compose, rehearse and share.
So repeat your best stories until they become community understanding. Paint. Write. Sing. Call your mom. Thank your Nanna. And get outside and goof around in another amazing summer.
Go see live music outdoors right now.
Ciao,
B mac
Slinks
Titans are titanic, giants, all-powerful, a family of gods from Greek mythology. Titan is also the name given to Saturn's largest moon, and the rockets used by NASA from 1959 to 2005. This is the metal on planet Earth with the most appropriate name. Titanium has the superpower of having the highest strength-to-weight ratio of all metals. The SR-71 Blackbird is a US military plane with an airframe and skin of this metal that flew at a sustained altitude of 85,069 feet and at speeds over 2,100 mph. At three times the speed of sound, the heat generated caused the plane to expand in length ten inches, and this is from a material prized for its thermal stability and rigidity. I strongly recommend visiting the ones on display. They are the epitome of a sculptural machine -- sleek, black darts whose only onboard weapon was thrust. They could outrun missiles. All modern military planes are pointy, with shapes that scream fast and lethal; but the Blackbird is easily the loveliest of line, more graceful than brutal, more science fiction than engineering fact, more Pininfarina, built more like a diving falcon than a gun in the sky.
Titanium is a greyish, very light, corrosion resistant, transition metal, discovered in Great Britain in 1791. These attributes combined with its thermal properties are ideal for military and aerospace applications requiring super strength and minimal weight. It is also a perfect material for making prosthetic implants and screws to hold bones in place, making hypoallergenic jewelry or eyeglass frames or bicycles or even horseshoes. (We eat .8 milligrams a day in our food, but because it's inert, it passes right through). I often wear these bracelets through the scanners at the airport. There is plenty of side-eye from the security involved, but this metal is not magnetic.
In 1997, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opened. It is sheathed in 42,875 panels of Titanium, each panel roughly 2' by 3' and .151 inches thick. The iconoclastic and visionary Frank Gehry, a titan of architecture, was studying potential sheathing materials in the parking lot of his Los Angeles offices. Stainless steel -- heavy, too reflective, and too gray, particularly on the rainy days common in Bilbao. Lead, toxic. Copper, too thermally unstable, heavy, reactive, structurally weak. One afternoon the test panel of Ti shone golden in the afternoon sun and the light tipped the scale. The Ti sheathing could be half the weight of stainless, but was still going to require 60 tons of a very expensive metal. Mined on every continent and ninth most abundant metal in the earth's crust, it's pricey because refining it is complicated, requiring multiple processes and artificial atmospheres to change it from mineral to metal. When construction bidding went out, Russia had just dumped stockpiles on the global market, sinking the price to a sweet spot. Material was sent to Pittsburgh in the U.S. for the technical metal fabrication of sheathing and hardware and back to the site where mountain climbers on ropes were employed to fasten the panels onto the compound curves of a climax of 20th Century design. The Guggenheim Bilbao is a 258,000 square foot sculpture of Deconstructivist architecture, a monumental art object of exquisitely curvaceous space, inside and out, AND an art museum, filled with treasure.
Fifteen years ago, I wanted to make portable sculpture, toys that could be reconfigured on a tabletop, little towers, rumpled piles, a circular fortification. Bracelets seemed like the answer. The first batch were stainless steel, brass and bronze. They sold well. We ran out. At the time I was playing with anodizing titanium, making 24" diameter bowls in pink and purple and gold and blue and green that were featured in a show at the Dartmouth museum. Titanium beckoned as a material guaranteed not to turn your arm black and be lighter AND would have all these colors available. The links are machined with a hyper precise CNC process and cut with an industrial water jet. Super tech and digital, but I have the cutter run fast causing texture and a little feathering on the surfaces. We called them Slinks. Five years ago we did a second batch and my son Schuyler, a mechanical engineer, introduced myriad finishes to the process.
And here we are. Generation 3 Slinks. We are working on some standard finishes to make them available through Etsy, but this missive is an invitation to get them in the experimental finishes stage. These are the initial batch. Pick one out. $350 each. Two for $600. Three for $900. Shipping is on us. Be sure to zoom on the photos to see the subtle differences in the finish work. Shoot us an email with your pick and we will do the rest.
Happy high summer!
The lake!! The lightning! The hot long evenings...
Peace my friends,
B Mac
P.S. I would like to cast backward five millennia. We were all members of tribes, families, clans. I like to think of these bracelets as signifiers of our lost brotherhood and sisterhood. Seeing someone wearing a Slink makes me smile every time. These are personal, finished by yours truly, your humble wizard. No two are ever identical. Hand finished things aren't. The colors on the metal are not patinas. They are caused by wavelength interference by light reflecting off a clear oxide layer and light reflecting off the surface of the metal itself. The nanoscale thickness of the oxide layer determines the color. It will not wear off; titanium oxide is one of the hardest things known. So join. These are tech and these are primitive. They will be around for thousands of years, maybe tens of thousands. Join the band. Share with only the cool humans. Wear a bit of the Blackbird.
O
"Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as riding in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane," wrote Annie Dillard in 1982 after seeing an eclipse from a mountainside in California. Last April, we lucky souls here in Vermont experienced a total solar eclipse. Now I have never fallen out of an airplane, but she is right. Standing on the lakeshore with a group of friends, we anxiously watched the sun being slowly obscured by the moon on a sunny afternoon. At first it was exciting and then seemed to be taking longer than it should. Nerves. As the moon's shadow expanded, the visual gave way to the physical. Our warm afternoon was getting kind of chilly. As the sunlight waned, colors became less vibrant, vital. A red shirt looked like dried blood. The green of the trees became sepia toned at an increasing rate and the sense of something impending grew. This is all cool and stuff but... Birds that were merrily singing on a spring day suddenly stopped in the same way that you don't notice the neighbor's lawnmower until he stops mowing. Colors drained more. The light was platinum instead of gold. Twilight at 3 in the afternoon. The sun was nearly gone. Only a sliver remained and you could stare right at it. I felt strangely afraid. Colder. Prickly. Looking west across the lake a wall of darkness was rushing toward us at 1500 miles an hour...
In Norse mythology, Fenrir, the monstrous wolf, pursued the sun and during an eclipse, devoured the sun. That's how this felt. Devouring. The world could end and it will feel just like this. The gods are angry and it is all over right now. The word "eclipse" comes from the Greek verb, "to abandon, to darken, to cease to exist."
Some of us were struck silent. Darkness fell, empty and private. Stars appeared. Tears on faces replaced the chatter. The black hole in the sky was ringed in white with two small red flares. Across a couple lawns, a small group on the beach cheered, for a moment. My consciousness left this century and abandoned what I know of science and retreated back five millennia to a shepherd in a landscape experiencing this impossibility. My lizard brain kicked in full force. This is the end. Staring directly at what can never be looked upon, time seemed to stop. Night. Stars. The white ring. The red flare. The silence of the world. We. Are. Lost.
There is a stone in Ireland that researchers claim holds a record of an eclipse on November 30th, 3340 BC, and a Syrian clay tablet records, accurately, an eclipse on March 5th, 1223 BC. Anaxagoras, a Greek philosopher, came up with a surprisingly scientific explanation of the arrangement of celestial bodies around 500 BC. We have the word "syzygy" to define this alignment. (Any other words have three y's and six letters? There is a piece for sale on my website with this name, btw.) But, back to the lizard brain part. The entire experience was shattering. My verbal fumbling about that afternoon is the falling out of the airplane. If you haven't seen a TOTAL ECLIPSE, you won't understand. Metaphor helps. Therefore...
This artwork, "Totality" and its siblings, "Corona" and "Nosara" are the first round pieces I have made in 25 years of making these light sculptures that rule my time on the planet. Up to now, squares and rectangles were the whole program. I like this format and their immediate reference to what Shakespeare observed, "the eyes are the windows to the soul." The black hole of an eclipse, the dark star, the pupil center and the iris surrounding are begging for more focus in the future. I'm all in even though these discs and their round frames are a pain in the butt to make. The looking out at the miracles of reality are perfectly matched with the looking in to the "windows" William celebrates. "Wide-eyed" could hardly be more apt.
Please share these missives and my art with anyone who needs a little light in their day. We are soon to release a compilation of these blog things that I have been scribbling for 15 years. Who wants one? Volume One is called "The Iridescent Veldt". In the meantime, buy art. You know you need it.
Happy summer y'all. Get outside and play till it hurts.
B Mac And Sarah the Fifth
P.S. And once my lizard brain lets go and I return to my constant fascination, a reminder: The surface of the sun is 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That corona, that white ring that we can only witness first-hand during an eclipse, is one to two million degrees a thousand miles above the sun's surface. Can't make this stuff up.
P.P.S. And for those of you that read all these. Moon, sun, what's next? How about the 15 quadrillion spiders on our planet. Yes? No?
P.P.S.S. And lastly, November 30th is my birthday AND Sarah's too. Hmmm...
The Deluge
Hi Friends,
So there we were three hours from Bozeman in the Badlands on a blazing hot Sunday afternoon and a hose split under the hood and started spitting coolant all over the engine...
There I was in the middle of a 16 mile paddle on my board. My pals are ahead out of sight. Wind is shifting hard to the west so straight abeam. Can't stand up anymore. Rain is starting to pelt and lightning hits the water right over there....
Ernest Shackleton's ship, the Endurance, was trapped in sea ice, crushed, and sank in 9,000 feet of water in 1915 around 7,000 miles from where his voyage began. His entire crew of 28 men were left stranded on the ice.
The dark side of the moon is not real. It's not a thing. All sides of the moon get the same amount of sunlight. What is real is the "back" side of the moon. Our moon is gravitationally locked to the Earth. Being 81 times more massive than our closest dance partner means that round rock is going nowhere but around us. However, the moon makes the Earth wobble. The Earth spins around its axis, as you know, day/night la la la, but that axis is also rotating in a conical path doing what is called "axial precession." Picture the path of a gyroscope as it's slowing down. We take around 26,000 years to complete the circle and this explains why today's North Star will not be the same for your great great great great great great grandkids. But while doing this there is another circular squiggle in the path of the axis called "nutation." This word is from the Latin for swaying or nodding and defines another wobble of the planet that makes a complete cycle in about eighteen and a half years. And finally, there is the Chandler Wobble. Yet another small wobble exists, first identified by Seth Carlo Chandler in 1891, caused by changes in the Earth's mantle and core and atmospheric and oceanic angular momentum and melting ice sheets and tectonic subsiding. Its effects occur over a fourteen month period.
What we experience as normal -- dawn, daytime, nightfall -- is the same. Lurking in the simple rotation of our home is the bizarre and the extraordinary; and this is where all stories start. It's the wobble. Everything was fine and dandy until... You see, normal is not normal. Even the mundane of day and night is full of twirling anomalies. There is no true path. The stories that define our lives are the wiggly bits, and chaos is EVERYWHERE. Cycling, circling. We cling to routines as comfort amidst the havoc. Even the simplest rhythms can break into exhilaration or injury or a chance meeting that changes EVERYTHING. Since one can't see the future, consider that today may be a day you will never forget. Today is a wobble. Who knew?
Schuyler and I fixed the split hose by talking to folks in a grocery store who sent us down the street to meet a chap with a garage and a big heart. It changed the timing of our little tragic moment such that we made Bozeman just as the sun was dropping behind the Crazy Mountains. Montana sunsets, yes sir!
I sprint paddled to the shore, crouched, and got drenched in the cold deluge while the squall howled over and off. Got back out on the lake and paddled home where my concerned pals cheered that I wasn't dead yet.
Shackleton? Well, just read the book "Endurance". It's a spell disguised as a book that will alter your life. You can touch his lifeboat in the basement of the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan right next to Anighito, a massive meteorite. Go ahead and touch a 34 ton rock from space that just dropped from the sky one day.
So be good. Be kind. People are dealing with wobbles. Remind yourself that forecasters are guessers, that what is going to happen is a total mystery. A pandemic, Pink Floyd, Fukushima, the discovery of free energy, a cure, Mt St. Helens, a working tokamak, hurricanes, rocks from the sky, meeting the love of your life, writing a song that eventually everyone sings, someone standing on the moon... Ridiculous, right? Nothing is more ridiculous than I am made of stardust and typing. Nothing.
It's all light my friends. Keep in mind the above when you look at the moon tonight. Hovering, calm, reflecting...And keep all this in mind when you read the newspaper. Get a puppy. Go for a hike. Call your mom. Buy some art. Find the comfort in the chaos. The wobbles will continue.
AND the first one to respond to this missive will get a third off of price on anything in the website. Don't hesitate. The second to respond gets a quarter off.
Spring!
B Mac
P.S. This may sound silly, but please read these blog thingys out loud. They have rhythm and pop and intentional stumblings that require breathing and enunciation. Ciao.
How Hot is That Flame
As someone who cooks, the transition from a gas stove to an induction cooktop is challenging.
A couple of weeks ago Amanda Petrusich wrote an article for the New Yorker about the band Phish. It's a poetic and comprehensive flyover about the audience, the bandmates, their history as Vermont locals who tour the globe serially selling out huge venues. It's almost a structure, the colossus of sound, belief, and affection that brings together a wildly diverse community. At the heart of her prose is the axis around which the circus spins -- The Portal -- a slice of space/time in which transcendence occurs. (And just by the by, I sold a 4' x 8' piece of my art named "The Portal" in December to a client who has it in a nice collection in Dallas). Amanda's metaphor of a doorway, a crossing of a threshold to another plane, references back to "The Doors of Perception", a book by Aldous Huxley published in 1954 discussing his experiences with mescaline. The phrase is lifted from a poem by William Blake written in 1793 -- "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite". These notions can be readily discounted by the portion of the population who have never been to a Phish show. Cosmic woo woo, smoked brains, too many shrooooms... step-children of the Grateful Dead... But if you have been to Madison Square Garden or the Sphere when the Portal opens, (and I have), there is an event, a moment that could be thirty seconds or twenty minutes in which the people around my seat levitate. They grin and dance. The music soars. They leave behind their jobs, their car that has started making a strange noise, their annoying boss, an under-performing portfolio or its non-existence, the frantic media of impending doom and they join the BAND. They visibly become a unity, a collective of brothers and sisters bound in the moment. They belong. Together. Right here. Right now. We ARE, with the explicit/implicit notion of "We."
In 1444, Thomas à Kempis, wrote the phrase "sic transit Gloria Mundi" which translates "thus passes the glory of the world." I came across the phrase somewhere years ago and wrote it in Sharpie on one of my work tables. It stared back at me for years. I made a triptych last year, three panels with the names "Time", "Space", and "Everything Else", and titled the whole shebang "Gloria Mundi". I wanted to focus on the "glory of the world" aspect and leave out the "thus passes" part. I sold it to a client who was finishing up a guest house project. I got to enjoy these panels on the walls of the gallery until last week when I installed them in their new home. Though sad to see them depart, I am thrilled with their presentation as I got to build a lighting system to optimize the artwork night and day. The phrase "sic transit Gloria Mundi" has been used for the last 600 years in the coronation of every pope.
The heart of this is the collective -- people want to belong. Humans need tribes. And they need to step outside, to give over to the team, to let go. They want a sense of release and we want to do it together. We want to be in groups. Scrolling Instagram or Facebook is really only fun when you share the fun stuff. Social media is alone time, until you share. I live in Red Sox nation, a collective with history and glory and miracles and songs and icons and holy ground. Warriors, Cavaliers, football or football, rugby, cricket or the church of MOMA, Monet, Richard Serra, James Turrell, Mecca, Paris... Choose.
Induction stoves make less indoor pollution but I have friends who recently built homes and were each insistent on their choices. One, a life-long chef and foodie, went with gas. The other, a devout environmentalist and foodie, went electric. Choose your group. A billion plus Catholics are a global mass of humanity bound by their beliefs. Every day I am mesmerized by the way light moves, the fierce orange-yellow from the glass furnaces next door to my studio, the slow liquid reflections on the windless lake, the iridescence of refraction on my artwork, the sky of a Vermont spring behind those blossoming cherries on Home Avenue.
I sold a big piece of art to one of the dudes who are Phish. It's what one is confronted with walking into his recording studio on the lakeshore. I can only hope they and their crew can find a moment of levitation in what I do. Wavelengths are my notes too. Near-death experiences are always recounted as approaching the light. Might as well approach it today too. Glory of the World, yes please...
Berkelium Bk #97
Day by day different
boxes of discrete realities
trade position with shadows
and sunlight followed with
dreams and then lunch.
February March April May
frozen then free then
inside and outside and
move up the column
and down the row
every atom ascending to
stability where time slows,
while electrons whirl merrily
without need of anything
to the end of
time and beyond where
what we know ends
and what we don't
flits above and out
just other and next
away from incomprehensible shapes
one after the other
whose meaning, like these
lines, bunched and arrayed,
only nudge and mumble
codes and geometric glintings,
without pine needles or
wavelets, the dog on
the sand dancing about.
Oh yes, I spoke
of the pure to
no one in particular
while the moon, always
still, yet scribbling light
on the surface blown
wiggly with night's breath
meaningful and ignored or
arbitrarily understood in stages,
while the canon sounds
and the shimmering won't
hold still one bit.
That swarm, just there,
gleaming on the water
we notice and love
and lose and leave.
Rains begin in California
and then warm returns
before the sun goes down.
Hi friends,
I wrote the lines above three years ago for my Elements book.
The blog piece that I wrote to send out today made me feel wiggly -- the lines on the page needed tuning; they felt overly complicated, lacking a center, maybe burdened with outside concerns...
I am heading to California very soon and the above poem swam up out of my mind. In reading the above lines, the words made me feel comfortable. We will be doing the San Francisco Fine Art Fair at the Fort Mason Center on April 17-20th. The title is an Element on the Periodic Chart, and I will be visiting family in Berkeley. Please read the above out loud. Take your time. Hope to see you folks on the travels I make with my art.
Peace and love,
We are all together.
Bruce
The Last Word
Marcel Duchamp famously stated "The artist performs only one part of the creative process. The onlooker completes it, and it is the onlooker who has the last word."
You folks who read these missives will recognize the through line that I express non-stop. Perceiving my work, looking at that image above, is a mere shadow of the art itself. To understand, to see, to feel the work is to stand in front of it, to move gently from one foot to the other, to wander slowly back and forth. Every subtle shift of your eyes changes what you see. What you see is not what I see, even as I stand beside you. My work "requires" participation of the sort Duchamp suggests in even a more literal sense. Have a look at the attached video links to get a sledgehammer concept of what I am saying. They will show you the shifting of light, color, refracted spectra; but looking at even a hi-res video on a little computer or phone screen will not let you "feel" the piece. These days I am loving working on large format pieces -- "Lotus" is 8' by 8'; "Suspension" is 4' by 8'; "Open Air" is 3' x 5'. The notion is immersion, room to swim around, visually and mentally, your brain processing the experience of dimension where there is no dimension.
In junior high, my dad, an English professor, talked with me about "suspension of disbelief" in god-knows-what context. What a weird phrase. I later ran into it in actual context when studying the British Romantics. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in 1817 "that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, (which) constitutes poetic faith." The idea that watching a play, a movie, is not actual life but a narrative of possibility that has value. This IS art. We get that our hero just had a car wreck and, though bleeding from his ears, is now riding a motorcycle on the roof of a market in Istanbul chasing the villian who has a robotic eye and stolen nuclear codes. Suspension of disbelief is required or this is no fun at all. If you have ever enjoyed a story involving time travel, then you are on the team. AND the antecedent of this choo choo of thought goes all the way back to Ancient Greek theatre.
When I started working on "Suspension" I was thinking its title would be "Three Body Solution". I was addressing the physical calculus of the famous three body problem by representing celestial objects exerting their gravity on each other and the viewer. The infinite possibilities of influence... The three forces... And then I realized that the three bodies of the problem are the viewer, the artwork and the artist. And back around to Duchamp we go. He wrote, "The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act."
During the photo shoot of these images in front of you, I was saying to Sarah, the mastermind behind the lens, that the center of this piece feels suspended from above. She asked the name of the piece. I said, "Dunno yet. What do you think?" She said "Suspension". And my brain clicked -- "suspension of disbelief." Boom. I make. We look. Name appears from the third person. Tripartite creation. Third body solution indeed.
The push and pull and off-speed swirl of the creative process is a mystery of conception, application, perseverance, and luck. Not all pieces are as strong. Not every panel vibrates. This one does and pivots nicely as an axis of the whole whirl itself. My artwork requires you and your scrutiny, my diligence, and the self-organizing nature of the universe to spin.
Send me a note now and then so I know you are paying attention. It's optional but rewarding. "Organized perception is what art is all about," said Roy Lichtenstein. That organization is you and me and the thing on the wall.
Thanks for noticing.
Please visit us and "Suspension" at the LA Art Show, February 19th through the 23rd. Part of the proceeds from our sales will be donated to the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank and 211LA
Hugs,
B Mac
Add Lightness
As a little boy, I had Matchbox cars. Being a little boy in England, I had a Lotus AND a BRM -- British Racing Motors. Having a toy, a race car, with my initials on the bottom was the coolest. As the years went by and my brain and horizons grew, my body didn't so much. I wrestled in tenth grade in the 105 pound class. Small, powerful things were my avatars. Freddy Patek. Cheetahs. Wizards. The British racing company founded by Colin Chapman -- Lotus Motorcars -- stood car design on its head, working out of old stables behind a railway hotel just north of London. As Ferrari and Mercedes were busy making ever more powerful track machines, Lotus made ultra-light cars. Chapman said, " Adding power makes cars faster on the straights, subtracting weight makes you faster everywhere." That was my kind of philosophy. Innes Ireland, who was a driver for Lotus claimed, "It should win the race and, as it crossed the finish line, it should collapse in a heap of bits". Efficiency at its purest. The revolutionary Lotus 49 was less than eight feet long, weighed 1,100 pounds, made 400 horsepower and dominated racing for years. Light and fast, Lotus won 79 Grand Prix races.
On Christmas Eve, just a few days ago, the Parker Solar Probe made its closest approach to our local star, completing a mission that was launched in 2018. The craft is moving 430,000 miles an hour (120 miles a second) and traveling three times faster than the previous fastest object made on earth. It's small, about seven feet by ten feet by three feet and weighs only 1,200 pounds. A hexagonal solar shield hides all the instrumentation from the searing 2,500 Fahrenheit heat and the radiation that is 475 times more fierce than a satellite orbiting the earth experiences. Some instruments are peeking out from behind the shield and collecting data about the sun's magnetic field and plasma bursts and the inner heliosphere. They are operating at nearly 3000 degrees as they were engineered. At the conclusion of the mission in around four months, the craft will rotate and incinerate all the instrumentation on board. The slab of carbon foam and foil reflector will continue orbiting the sun for millions of years.
The lotus is an aquatic plant, a water lily. In Sanskrit it is known as Padma or Kamala. Growing in flood plains or slow moving water, it is a perennial with seeds that can become dormant and survive extreme and prolonged drought. Researchers have sprouted seeds that are 1,500 years old, which explains why in Chinese culture, the lotus is a symbol for longevity. The edible seeds have been cultivated for over 3000 years, and they can be dried and used as prayer beads. The roots can be fried or pickled or made into tea or eaten as a potato-like vegetable; the stems appear in salads, curries and soups. All parts of the plant are used in folk medicines. The lotus flower is the national flower of Vietnam and India.
Nearly two billion people worldwide view the lotus as a sacred symbol of heaven. In Hinduism and Buddhism the flower signifies the path to spiritual awakening -- the rising above the decay and darkness beneath the surface of the water to blossom in the purity of the light above. The Sanskrit word "moksha" refers to freedom from ignorance and the development of a state of self-knowledge and enlightenment. This, in Hindu traditions, is the aim of human life. It is a state of perfection, symbolized by delicate white blossoms emerging from the mud. "No mud, no lotus" is a phrase at the heart of a book by Thich Nhat Hahn examining the human condition from the perspective that suffering is an essential aspect of the human experience. Mud is required. Darkness is half the day. You want to orbit the sun, spend six years getting up to speed. You want to build a race car, start in a stable. When I flew back from England at six years old, I left my cars in a little bag under the seat in the airplane. I was crushed.
Tadao Ando is an architect I have followed for decades. Six months ago I got to walk around an opus work of his, the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, completed in 2002. His mediums are concrete and light, essentially sculpted planes of grey stone and sunlight often incorporating water in his designs for reflection and glimmer. He joins this missive because of his Water Temple built in 1991 on the Japanese Island of Awaji. I remember when this opened. Most dramatic buildings require ascending steps to a lofty construction, (cathedral, capitol, domes, soaring arches, sky scraping monoliths). This space, the Hompuki Temple, is entered by descending a narrow, concrete staircase into a large, oval pond of lotus blossoms. The path to enlightenment can require descending too.
When your mission is done, all the speedy stuff of life, you will cross a finish line and collapse in a heap of parts. Or pivot and incinerate in the sun's blast. Or descend the stairs into the flowers. In the meantime, accept the mud. Get new toys. Survive the drought. Move your body. Add lightness.
The lotus blooms pristine and perfect from the muck.
And of course, buy art. It helps with focus to have a reminder in the house that light and brilliance are right HERE. Personally, I'll skip the lotus root tea. I like lattes with my enlightenment. Maybe I'll title the next piece "Caffeine".
Peace out,
b mac
P.S. I am fully aware that this is a speed dial into an immersive topic, cold plunge followed by lava bath. Racecars, flowers, spacecraft and, by the by, spiritual enlightenment... We will expand on this. In the meantime, the days are getting longer and the sunlight strengthens. Slingshot the sun. Pick up the tempo.
2024, Eclipse, Syzygy, Solstice, fa la la...
I love birds mostly because of their absurdity. If you haven’t read these missives of mine over the years, here’s a refresher.
The ostrich has one claw on each foot and are known to eviscerate lions, run 43 miles an hour, keep rocks in their stomach, and can weigh up to 300 pounds. Golden crowned kinglets live all winter in Vermont snuggling together at night, eat only bugs and weigh about as much as a nickel. Frigatebirds have 7 1/2 foot wingspans. Their bones weigh around four ounces and they can sleep while flying. Owls have tubular eyes that are fixed in their skulls, poop bones, and can be heard for miles hooting outside my window at night, yet fly in utter silence. The bee hummingbird lays eggs the size of a coffee bean, weighs about two grams, and can “flap” its wings 200 times a second. All birds originated around 60 million years ago and are more closely related to dinosaurs and crocodiles than mammals.
I found myself at an art show in Miami last week talking to a young woman physicist who worked on the LIGO detector and was clearly delighted to be in conversation with someone who knows it exists. We chatted about gravitational waves — the bend in space time caused by a kilonova collision — and she corrected me when I said the detector observed a change the size of a proton over a seven mile beam of laser light. “It’s actually a thousandth of that number.”
So, birds are absurd. Scientists on the cutting edge of defining the laws governing the cosmos are brilliant, slightly isolated in their passion, and aware of the ridiculous nature of these aspects of their careers. Humans do crazy things.
The holidays are upon us where we celebrate rituals based on things that may or may not have occurred, but we love them and teach our kids to love them. The Christmas tree?! Why? That’s not in the holy books. Did the oil light the lamps for eight days? Astronomers centuries ago identified the solstice that is happening today. They were probably considered ridiculous by the faith leaders, or were the faith healers…
Humans include Sonny Rollins, Stephan Hawking, Taylor Swift, Shakespeare, Ghandi, Aristotle, the Dalai Lama, Brad Pitt, Martin Luther King, Alexander the Great, Churchhill, Nolan Ryan and all those northerners who dreamt up Odin and Thor and all those southerners who invented the digeridoo and Dreamtime painting and believe that land ownership is humorous. The Nazca lines have a 300 foot hummingbird drawing made around 2000 years ago. The pyramids… Notre Dame… strange human creations…
We are all weirdos. Myself especially, but please please please see us as all one group. Two eyes, a nose, a brain, legs… We are way more alike than the critters that surround us. Don’t get me started on the self-aware cephalopods that branched away from us half a billion years ago. They have brains in their arms and can see polarized light. Sharks are older than trees. But humans, all humans, are the same animal. The closest correlate that comes to mind are dogs. Chihuahuas and mastiffs are nearly identical on the dna level. We humans are all the same, with variations that are slight at most.
So, act like it my friends, especially in these fractious times. It’s the holidays, the holy days, where we speak of peace on earth and good will to Man. This is a light, fluffy missive, a holiday card about the longest night of the year yielding to the emerging light. Let’s celebrate our variety and acknowledge our sameness. We believe in different gods and rituals. We make crazy art and monuments. But at the core, we are all just large children trying to make a path through the craziness. Play with the kids. Make great food. Pause and notice.
Mostly, peace and love.
Let’s go again.
Cheers!
B Mac and Sarah V here at Havoc ground control. Who wants a tee shirt that says HAVOC on the front and Chaos Coordinator on the back?
P.S. And, as always, buy art. It hangs in your living room and says hey… pay attention. Today.
P.P.S. Please share this card as we don't have everyone's email. Thanks.
Surf’s Up
"When you come to the place where the road and the sky collide,
Throw me over the edge and let my spirit glide..."
Why is the sky blue? Everyone knows that it's because of blue scattering. The lower end of our visible spectrum of electromagnetic radiation is deflected more by the air molecules in the atmosphere as blue is shorter wavelengths. It might logically be purple, as violet is even shorter, and still visible to humans; but the sun emits far more energy in the blue wavelengths than purple due to its composition. AND our eyes are more sensitive to blue wavelengths than purple. La la la. We all know this. But, why is the sky blue?
Plankton, the original green stuff. The earth had mostly a methane atmosphere until two billion years of plankton, hard at work, made the air 21% oxygen. Lucky for us. Air is mostly nitrogen (78%), because the primordial rocks of the planet itself are chock full of the gas. Cracks in the crust and volcanoes top it up constantly. Also, the nitrogen cycle of plants and bacteria and algae are "fixating" nitrogen into usable compounds for the ongoing abundance of life. This ratio has been generally stable for 100 million years. There is a whole other topic here about fertilizers to feed the planet that involves bird shit, bat guano, cow manure... but we have heard enough in this arena of late. So thank you plankton. Full stop.
But let's not confuse causation with correlation. Climate scientists are nearly unanimous in blaming the global temperature rise on the trillions of tons of carbon dioxide emitted since humans started burning things -- wood, then coal, then oil. And today, wildfires and deforestation, both intentional and incidental, make it worse. Greenland is melting, exposing more rock and dust which is not as reflective as white snow and so the temperature rise is accelerating. Should the ice dome of Greenland melt completely, global sea level will rise twenty feet. Weirdly, carbon dioxide is a trace gas in the atmosphere accounting for only .04 percent along with its pals, methane, ozone and nitrous oxide (laughing gas), and a handful of others. Scientists are also quick to point out that in the 450,000 centuries that the earth has been here, there have been massive fluctuations in its temperature and surface biology. The last ice age that buried North America began around 120,000 years ago and peaked only 18,000 years ago. The planet warmed. The ice melted rapidly between 18,000 and 6,000 years ago.
Moving on. Have you noticed all the old birds flying around of late? No?! Why not? You have to figure a lot of those birds are really old. They don't get grey hair. They don't stumble through the sky. They might hang out and grumble a ton with their friends on the shoreline, but that seems normal.
Recently in the news there have been "bomb cyclones". Out West there was a "snowpocalypse" in the Sierras. Looking back was acid rain, sinkholes, red tides and the polar vortex. We had "killer bees" and now "murder hornets". "Supercells" are becoming common. "Fire tornados" are a thing, as are "snownadoes." "Derecho" flew by me recently and I looked it up to find that it is a "widespread, long-lived, straight-line wind storm known as a mesoscale convective system." Look up the periodic disaster called "zud."
Not for a second is anyone to read this as an essay downplaying the emotional rollercoaster we have experienced. The ongoing ramifications of what is taking place in the government are widespread and potentially catastrophic for the culture we have come to know as our "home." Or not. We can't know the outcomes. We can only operate as we should with love and kindness for every person we are in contact with in this little blip of time that is our lot in the galaxy. The media is LOUD. Enemies exist everywhere, according to them. Inanity and insanity abound.
Play with the kids. Grow your garden. Ski. Sled ride. Coach hockey. Make art. Sing. Dance. Chef up a feast. The sky has been falling since I was told about Chicken Little. Send clothes to Ukraine. Support anyone or anything that is trying to feed and clothe those that need the help.
I am supposed to be writing about art and I will next time. But all these words come from a three pound pink jello that is behind my eyes and a heart that is in the waning half of beating two and a half billion times. I feel fortunate every morning to awaken. We have a chance daily to lighten, to laugh, to care. Do it.
Jackson Browne sang the above lines decades ago and followed with the lyric, "I could be just around the corner from heaven or a mile from hell." So today, " let my spirit glide".
Like every bird you ever see.
Got that out.
Peace. And for real, hugs.
Bruce mac
P.S. AND, as I was writing this missive after singing the above lines to myself for a couple days, I thought it best to check my memory of the lyrics and BOOM. This song, on Jackson Browne's album "Late For The Sky," was written by Danny O'Keefe, a dear friend of mine my entire adult life. In fact, Danny, a truly brilliant human, songwriter and guitarist extraordinaire, with a soulful singing voice that can bring tears, borrowed an image of one of my pieces for his last album. "Circular Turns" is available on Amazon.
P.P.S. The artwork above is named "Nazaré" for the surf spot in Portugal, home to the biggest waves ever ridden. Have a wander through the Youtube universe of the brave and crazy on hundred foot waves on a surfboard. My friends, this is the metaphor for the moment. Momento mori. Only thing to do is surf, whatever the wave height.
P.P.S.S. Come see us at the Scope show in Miami Beach, Dec. 3rd through the 8th, Booth #B029. We can toast plankton and old birds. Keep on flying. And thanks Danny, for the poetry.
P.P.S.S.S. Blue, violet, green, red, white, Browne...
The Thing that is not a Thing
In my sketchbook is a page from some time ago that I don't remember and all it says is:
"There is no universe without us to see it. There is no us without the exploding star. It is us. We are it."
The next page is empty.
Clearly there was some transition going on there enough to break down to first principles -- what does one know? Only that one is aware and thinking and ...
Remembering my old homework: Immanuel Kant, Issac Newton and the Age of Reason -- space and time are distinct; the world is physical and knowable. That was the 18th century. The 19th century and William Blake state time and space are one and the same. The philosopher as authority switches to the poet. The Romantics, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley, stated that the world is half-perceived and half-created. (I'm paraphrasing, criminally, "Tintern Abbey"). Lots of opium use in England at the time, predescessing our counterculture by more than a century. Along came Einstein and Niels Bohr and the equation tying mass and light together and the notion that light is a wave AND a particle, both a thing and not a thing, but a movement. AND Shroedinger pointed out that just looking at a thing makes the thing different. And now 21st Century and Frank Wilzek, the Nobel prize winning physicist explaining in his fabulous book "Fundamentals" that there really aren't any "things" on a quantum level -- it's all just spin, spin direction, and velocity and charges. Feeling better now?
And so, surfing... I just lost the lease on my studio and gallery where I have been making magic for thirteen years. Do you remember learning how to walk and how that felt? I don't either, but that was a big deal. Is reality solid and linear? Nope. Is every day a something that is a miracle but you likely won't remember after a while? Yep. Am I forced to change? Yep, and initially pretty angry about it, but hey, waves. Wind and waves.. This is a wicked fun ride with speed and falling and constant motion. And on some level, I was expecting this. The Russian philosopher P. D. Ospensky wrote,
"Only the fine apparatus, which is called 'the soul of an artist' can understand and feel the reflection of the noumenon in the phenomenon. In art it is necessary to study the hidden side of life. The artist must be clairvoyant: he must see what others do not see; he must be a magician, must possess the power to make others see that which they do not themselves see, but which he does see."
Art is precognitive. Moving on a wave is precognitive. Snowboarding at tempo through trees in steep snowy pitches REQUIRES not thinking, only responding. Adapting to life's challenges is, when done well, like surfing. Ride the wave whatever size appears, crumbly, wind blown, too fast... (I highly recommend "Barbarian Days, A Surfing Life" by William Finnegan). I'm on to a new break, a new swell, new mates in the water, different beach, depths unknown, different slant of the light... I was angry that I was forced to change and now I'm thrilled. Let's go.
Many years ago at an art show I was next to a huckster type dude who just seemed overly friendly with everyone. Eavesdropping, I heard an older couple shuffle in and explain that they haven't been reordering from him as their store had burned down. The guy, Sergio, said, "That's great! You can start fresh. Build everything perfect from scratch." I will never forget the moment. He was beaming and earnest and the couple visibly brightened.
So. Buy art right now so I don't move twice what's in the gallery today. This will assist my move and lighten the truck. As I type on this miraculous device we call a laptop, dragonflies are grabbing sips on the fly from the humongous puddle that is the driveway. Dragonflies are revered in Japan as symbols of rebirth, courage, and strength. Of course they are here right now.
In closing, my lease ending is real and a metaphor. We all face much more dire challenges than packing and moving. This life is temporary, finite. But dragonflies have been around for 300 million years. Keep going; remember to hydrate. Hugs on a 90 degree summer day, smack in the middle of the constant of change...
b mac
P.S. We operate in a world of illusion. Bob Dylan sang, "What looks large from a distance, close up, ain't never that big." He and William and Frank won Pulitzer prizes for explorations of this intangible something we experience every day.
P.P.S. Personally, my operating principle could be swiped from the Grateful Dead, "Wake up to find out, you are the eyes of the world."