Winston Churchill, the Knuckleballer, and a Turtle

"Fall seven times. Stand up eight." That's what a little scrap of paper says that I snipped out of a magazine decades ago and currently resides thumbtacked to the inside of my closet door. Watching the Olympics recently refocused this notion for me. There are countless tales of athletes whose careers are a series of disasters and failures and yet they somehow continue performing their magic acts on the track or on the mat, in the ring, in the air...

R. A. Dickey is a pitcher drafted out of college in 1996 by the Texas Rangers and offered a signing bonus of $810,000. One of the team doctors noticed in a photo Dickey's pitching arm hanging oddly and further evaluation discovered he was missing a ligament in his arm. His bonus was reduced to $75,000 and off he went to the minor leagues. He finally debuted in the majors in 2001 with a losing season and was sent back to the farm teams. Struggling with obscurity and losing games, he toyed with different pitches and his signature forkball that he dubbed "The Thing." He became the rarest of the rare--a knuckleball pitcher--and battled on. Finally given the chance in 2006, he started for the Texas Rangers and gave up six home runs in his first game. Back to the minors in Oklahoma. Two years later he was called up again and pitched for the Seattle Mariners and tied the major league record with four wild pitches in one inning. By refusing to go back to the minors he was traded to the Minnesota Twins and started 35 games for them in 2009. In 2010 he was back in the minors pitching for the Buffalo Bisons and the Mets bought his contract. Then, he got it--the magic of endless hours distilled. In 2012 he was the most dominant pitcher in baseball rattling off 230 strikeouts and a series of staggering scoreless games. He went 44 innings on one stretch without an earned run and won the Cy Young Award, never before given to a knuckleballer, for the best pitcher in the National League. His contract was upped to $37 million for three years. Today they play the theme from Game of Thrones when he comes to bat and he swings bats named for weapons from the Tolkien books. Joe Girardi, who manages the Yankees, said during an in-game interview a couple years ago (while being walloped by the Red Sox) something so pithy I ran to the kitchen for paper to write it down: "That's what life is all about--fighting through things."

Then again, there is the Ernest Shackleton voyage. If you haven't read the book "Endurance," you must. No better tale of adversity. Seriously. If they did THAT?! You can do anything.

Leah Berliawsky was born in 1899 in the Ukraine. Her family emigrated to Maine where her father was a woodworker, lumberjack and ran a junkyard. She went to school and became a secretary in Manhattan, changed her name to Louise and married her employer, Charles Nevelson, to become part of elite society. When the socialite, conformist wifey role her husband demanded didn't work out she left the money and security and returned with a son back to Maine and then back to the streets of New York to pursue the art that she felt was buzzing through her being. She struggled, studying art with some of the greatest of the Expressionists of the era, but selling almost nothing of her own work. She heated her apartment with scavenged wood from the streets. When she was 61 years old MOMA purchased one of her pieces. As an outspoken, feminist artist, she was on the cover of Life magazine and was courted by a large gallery to do a grand opening salon. Not a single piece sold. Left broke and depressed and nearly homeless, she relied on friends to get by. At 64, the Pace Gallery in New York gave her a show and the art world and museums across the globe stepped up to recognize her genius. Louise Nevelson started monumental outdoor sculpture in her 70's and today remains one of the influential visions of 20th Century art. Look for her work my friends. It hums silently. Kind of like Richard Serra. Check him out too.

So, the theme for all these words started with the Olympics and circled back with my rereading the other blog pieces I have written in the past couple years. ((They are here.)) Resilience. There are some teeny animals called tardigrades, whose name means "slow walkers." These guys have survived all five mass extinctions--they have been around for half a billion years. Only a millimeter long, they endured ten days aboard a rocket exposed to the searing radiation and absolute vacuum of space. They are able to withstand 1000 times more radiation than a human as well as 300 degrees Fahrenheit to near absolute zero. They like moss and swimming. They are nicknamed water bears and are arguably the most durable organism ever. However, there is a critter being studied called the immortal jellyfish that seems to apparently live forever by cycling between growing up and then reverting to childhood, endlessly. I like these guys too in a conceptual way, but we can talk about them next time.

Winston Churchill famously said, "Never, ever ever ever ever give up." Attached to this letter is a video that I shot last week with my phone. It's two snapping turtles in the lagoon at Camp in Central Vermont. Our resident smartest guy in the room regarding the natural world, my buddy Red Dows, says the largest is likely protecting his territory. Their fight lasted for hours and hours. The big one looks to be around 35-40 lbs. and therefore might be around 75 years old. It's his lagoon cuz he sez so as long as he wants it. So back off young terrapin!

R. A. Dickey wrote a book that says in the third sentence that he will never lead the league in strikeouts. He did just that in 2012. There was a young woman who grew up in a Rio favela. With judo she fought her way to the 2012 Olympic games and was disqualified for an illegal move. As a child she walked to the gym because she couldn't afford the bus. Last week she won a gold medal.

With health, with work, with athletics, with life in general... Churchill also said, "If you are going through Hell, keep going."

We are what we do my friends.

Rock steady,Bruce

Time Machinery and Random Order

Things happen with bizarre coherence. I moved to California years ago and was trying to find a house near the beach to rent. On the way to look at what sounded like an ideal spot a half block from the sand, we stopped in traffic just at that moment as the big red ball dropped into the Pacific. A moment's pause, a collective sigh and the green flash appeared. Just for a second or two a neon green blob appeared right where the sun had disappeared. Often seen by pilots, this rare optical phenomena was first photographed in 1960; it is momentary, fleeting, a magical convergence of refraction and witness. The house on the beach we rented that day was on Emerald Court.

Things happen randomly. Five days ago, the fourth of July, while out riding my bike, I was sitting up chatting with my brother Kevin as we soft pedaled down a mellow decline in the lusciousness of an 80 degree Vermont afternoon. Humid sunshine. Sweat. Perfection. My front wheel dropped off the pavement and my instinctual bunny-hop back onto the road whacked me into Kev's handlebars. Slam! Slide! Imagine being pitched out of a moving pick-up in skimpy pjs attached to some garden tools. Both of us down and grinding skin and tissue in less than a heartbeat. Bikes instantly worthless as bikes. Adrenaline hammered and twitching with survival body chemistry, we jumped up READY. Swords drawn. Pissed off. Blood dripping.

Things happen on time. Also in the last week, Nasa's Juno spacecraft arrived after traveling five years and 1.7 billion miles to orbit and study our solar system's largest dance partner. It arrived off its projected schedule established five years ago by one second! Humans are great at planning long range stuff like this. (I have a hard time getting to lunch when I'm supposed to.) We spent 25 years building the most monumental machine in human history, the Large Hadron Collider, in hopes of taking a photo of a particle that exists for a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second. It works. Say "Cheese" Higgs Bosun. Some things happen VERY FAST.

Things happen we foresee. At New College in Oxford, England, founded in 1379 (classic Brit humor right there) massive oak beams in the dining hall were being eaten by beetles as old oak beams in England eventually do. Turns out 500 years ago a stand of oaks had been planted on college property to take care of this challenge when the time came.

We do what we do and then WHAM! Life seems to be a succession of things being just as they are nicely until they aren't, suddenly. But--and this is the heart of this missive--the staggering improbability that all the infinite possible vectors perfectly aligned to become me seated on a bicycle is an affirmation of the perfection lurking within every single moment of every day. Random elements collided. Water appeared. Life. Legs. Eyes. Families. I have a brother who loves bikes as much as I do. And we get to see each other and ride together. Science can't explain this. Things are just happening willy nilly in every direction all the time. Green flashes. Quantum collisions.

I was once told about a monk who painted in the Japanese Sumi-e tradition. When asked by an acolyte how long it took him to make a painting that appeared to be a single stroke of an inked brush on paper, his answer was "87 years, 10 months, 4 days, 8 hours and 6 seconds,"--his age at that moment.

The fovea is a small depression centered in the retina where visual acuity is strongest. Half of the nerves from the eye to the brain originate here. That is me, the fovea. I have spent all these years translating the subtle and not so subtle movement of light. And I am convinced that it is all playing out exactly the way it is supposed to, needs to, in some ridiculous organic mechanism. Light reflecting this way and that. Precisely. The Jupiter probe showed up a second late, exactly that second that I needed to bunny-hop to safety. But nooooo. There must be some tiny whirring cog that I don't comprehend yet...

Change is the only constant. In my daily twirl, I build silent machines that hang there and monkey with light. They will be around when my time sneaks off. They change and don't change. I hope you all find some of that each day--solace in the steadiness, faith in the randomness. Keep the rubber side down and your eyes on the horizon. Plan long range and bounce when you have to. Our notions about time are deceptive and relative and subject to revision at any SLAM. But I am certain that it is the right time.

Enjoy summertime.

It's quick, although the days are long. See what I mean... Hugs all around,

Bruce

Eagle Eye

Headlines tell us that gorillas are precious, politicians are super scary, four new Elements are getting actual names, guns kill, Brazil is a mess but has new stadiums, the Dead is on tour, Ali is gone, Prince too, and where does who go to the bathroom? In the middle of all of this shouting we find ourselves. Or we don't. That is the conundrum. Where do we as individuals live today amidst the massive explosion that seems to be civilization?

Paraceratherium Grangeri (say that five times) was the largest mammal ever to walk the earth. It was a hornless rhinoceros species that survived for 11 million years ranging from Mongolia to the Balkans. Roughly 17 feet tall at the shoulders, it weighed up to 40,000 pounds or about the weight of five elephants. Imagine a herd of those wandering about, munching on trees, devoid of fear from any predators. In the '60s, there were 65,000 black rhinos in the wild. In the '70s, ninety percent of them were killed and today there are a total of around 5,000 rhinos altogether on the planet. The white rhino is down to three individuals, all in zoos.

I recently read that the total time spent on the video game World of Warcraft was 5.93 million years, or about the equivalent time since our ancestors first stood erect. Biologically, the bodily sensations of anxiety and excitement are nearly identical, so fighting wars - pretend wars - can be really, really stressful and exciting. Clearly, this stuff is addictive. And how about the media? Well, does anyone notice the absolute incendiary nature of the headlines on the Internet? Every storm is the end of the world, every speech is the collapse of the Constitution. The most popular shows on the tube are about cops and terrorists or war and battles with dragons and torture and who gets killed (or magically brought back to life this week) and poison and bribes and judges and slaves and daggers and bedfellows. And this is just the election coverage...

But we can do this. In the 1950's, there were less than 417 breeding pairs of bald eagles in the contiguous U.S. Today there are over 10,000 pairs and the number is growing. I have seen one in my pajamas (How he got in my pajamas I'll never know... ;) Groucho) from my living room and one flew over my head at a Mariners' game in Seattle last summer. Think of that moment in the movie when the plucky short guy in the deepest of jams says to the hero, "Just go, I got this." And off the hero charges to save the rest of the universe.

What is this about? (The exact moment to ask, I think).

It's about what I say to my teenagers all the time. "Take care of each other." That's it. Look out for the person next to you all the time. If you have their back and they have yours we have a chance. Every single person you talk to today was a child and on many levels still is. Treat them with that love and caring you would show to a small, young human being and we can get through all this noise. Focus on the people around you. We are the pinnacle of evolution. Let's act like it. Killing mega fauna is stupid. Every kid will tell you that. Killing things on screens is just reinforcing killing, and wasting the most precious thing we all have...

The root of the word civilization is the same as the one for civility. The non-stop shouting of disaster is the foreground visual assault from all these glass screens. Actual humanity is on the other side waiting. It's pretty awesome. You know, craft beer, garter snakes, bikes, surprise presents, boats of all kinds, lightning, strolling, love, and other cool stuff.... Just hug somebody and tell them we got this. Together. Don't listen to the shouting and the hateful speech. We got this.

Summer in,
Peace out,

"Summer of Love" sounds pretty great. Let's replay that notion.

And while you are at it, slow down and have a look at some quality art, the kind made by the people who devote their lives to seeing and contemplating and making...

Supernovas Become you

Yes, it's true. Stellar annihilation looks good on you. Or is it supernovae? Words can be so tricky. But they are fun to play with, kind of like Legos made of old jelly. "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money" said Boswell, quoting Samuel Johnson around 300 years ago. I, like Charlie Brown, have known my whole life that being a blockhead is ok, just challenging. This quote was given to me in freshman English by a class visitor in a white suit. His name was Tom Wolfe.

But, to the point--I am a blockhead. I write, not for money but to participate, which in many ways is what defines everyone of us before we become worm food. Participate. Have an effect. It's all you got. Do you need to be a visionary on the front lines of social change? Nope. Just coach Little League. Pick up around the neighborhood. Visit a classroom and chat to the mere mortals. Give away stuff you don't use.

Speaking of stuff, our bodies are primarily composed of four elements that happen to be four of the first seven most abundant elements in the universe. In fact we are 99% just six elements. Only Hydrogen and Helium were made in the Big Bang in any significant quantity. Every bit of the rest of our bodies was made in a large star (don't ask me which one) and would have stayed home until the supernova came to town. We only exist because of the stellar KABOOM that freed these materials to eventually become Us. Better add the life giving supernova to Thanksgiving dinner blessings or the salaams at the P-rade.

Celebrating the supernova is part of my blockhead program. Fiona Apple sings, "If there was a better way, it would find me." As far as the participation part? Please add this email address and the address of havocgallery.com to your favorites list. Our web homework shows that using an actual professional emailing program means the majority of you brilliant friends have not been receiving the last few missives even though they look better than ever. Being in the junk box or spam folder is soul crushing and smells weird. This is never required reading but I write to share thoughts and images, and I want you to share these with your pals too. In the website www.havocgallery.com you can click around and find a heading called Current Thinking that has all of these blog thingys I have written recently. Share freely and respond. I had a buddy point out that the Cree word for dragonfly and helicopter is exactly the same. Thanks Ben. Look out for the "du whack a du..."

So, metals and gases made in nuclear infernos make us entirely. In the same song, Fiona Apple sings, "I am an extraordinary machine." That goes for you too. Be extraordinary today my friends. Again.

Super Massive Burgers

If the earth weighs as much as a paperclip, the sun weighs as much as a Harley-Davidson. The most massive star we have found so far is 265 times heavier than that. Labelled with the totally unimaginative, R136a1, it is stupendously hot and bright--its surface is 100,000 degrees Fahrenheit, 10 times hotter than our sun and 10 million times brighter. We have also recently identified (and I say "we" meaning the frighteningly intelligent physicists hard at work on these matters) a star even larger in diameter that is named UY Scuti. It weighs less than our other new best pal star but if you put its center at the center of our sun, the surface of the star would be out past the orbit of Jupiter. Pause pause. Think about that for a moment...

But what's the big deal, Lucille? So what, so stars, yeah, really big... Then...

It's all about the scale. McDonald's feeds around 26 million people a day, more than the population of Australia. Every kilogram of beef generates around 59.5 pounds of greenhouse gases. Every gram of beef protein requires 29.5 gallons of water. The average American eats 185 pounds of meat a year, whereas the USDA 2010 guidelines are for 3.7 ounces a day. Recent studies show a typical male needs only 2.5 ounces of protein a day and an elite endurance athlete might require around 6 ounces. Here's the kicker--above that amount, it is simply excreted.

What do stars have to do with food? Simply put--we are teeny, tiny motes of nothing stuck on a speck of dust orbiting a little warm ball. But, it's the only speck we get. If we can get this notion through our collective over-fed heads, there may be a chance to have great-great-great-grandchildren who look like us, can sing, dance and paint and play baseball and write pushy essays. And not have to swim to the grocery store. Right now factory farms in the U.S. produce thirteen times the sewage of the human population. If we were to eat meat only two days a week, we would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and water and land use by 45%.

We can evolve. We can make conscious choices about our food and our future. Seems kind of important, yes?

The new James Webb Space Telescope is so sophisticated it can detect the heat of a bumblebee from a distance of 250,000 miles. That's as far as the moon, folks. With that kind of brain power we should be able to eat better. Bon appetit.

Oh, and as for chocolate, well, dark only, everyday. Mandatory.

And I was kidding about "motes of nothing." We are voters.

You Don't Have Time to Not Read This

In 2013, a groundskeeper at Stonehenge was trying to fight the unusually dry summer in Britain. His hose wasn't quite long enough to water the entire grounds and the subsequent patches of parched grass revealed the true geometry of the stones that researchers have investigated for centuries. Yep. It was originally a complete circle.

Below all these words is a photo of my Dad and us four brothers at Stonehenge in 1964, corralled for a moment by my Mom shooting the picture. We spent the afternoon climbing all over those massive bluestone slabs. Dad was great at dragging us to visit strange stuff. Hadrian's Wall. Pisa. The Last Supper. Tintagel. "Lads, pay attention."

Wilhelm Röntgen was in his lab in 1895 experimenting with these newfangled things called cathode ray tubes. A black cardboard sleeve over the tube mysteriously failed to block some invisible ray that caused a piece of cardboard nine feet away painted with barium platinocyanide to shimmer faintly. He happened to notice this weird effect that resulted in the discovery of the paradigm shift we know as x-rays.

We all know that Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin in 1928 (Right?) changing the field of medicine. But the story is told that the reason he didn't just heave into the trash that fateful petri dish is that six years earlier he had wept into a sample dish and discovered tears have a mild antibiotic property. Not sure what he was crying about in his lab, but he was being attentive.

In 1913, in Sheffield England, a guy was assigned to come up with a steel alloy that would withstand, without expanding, the intense heat of a bullet streaking down the barrel of a rifle. In the bin of cast-off ingots he noticed one hunk of metal buried in the pile was still shiny while the rest of the ingots were rusting as usual. His employers ignored his discovery of stainless steel with the magic ingredient of 12% Chromium. It's the same stuff I use everyday to push light around.

Notice. That's this week's lesson, my friends. Be careful not to be bustling along too quickly as to miss the magical stuff happening constantly. It could make for a nice photo on your cell phone or change the course of humankind. Or solve a mystery 5,000 years old. Or teach a mob of unruly boys lessons that still gleam to this day. Socrates said, "Beware the barrenness of a busy life."

Smart old dude. And, by the way, thanks Dad.

We Could be Heroes...

Hi Friends,

There is a lot I could say, which comes as a surprise to no one who knows me well, but there is beauty in economy. So this is just some paraphrasing from a bright light gone dim.

I, I can remember (I remember)
standing, by the wall (by the wall)
And the guns shot above our heads
(over our heads)
And we kissed, as nothing could fall
(nothing could fall)...
We can be heroes,
What d'you say?
We could be safer
just for one day...
We can be heroes
What d'you say?
We could be heroes
Just for one day...

We will be heroes. Thanks Mr. Bowie.
Blessings. all best,Bruce

The Force Awakens

Hi Friends,

It's the solstice, that moment when the gloom of December light in Vermont is offset by the thought that from now on the days get longer. Winter begins but from the celestial perspective summer begins today. The sun will get higher and stronger. The days will get brighter and longer. It feels nice to consider the darkness so strong will wane and light and warmth will rule. But first... The days just now feel like the sunset is about to start around two in the afternoon.

I was out for a paddle on my board a few weeks back. Typically I paddle straight into the wind to start, whatever its direction, and that day it was cranking hard due west; it's the workout part of a paddle. I crossed the bay. The sun sank behind Shelburne Point and I headed north out into the broad lake watching the orb get bigger and redder and finally drop into the skyline of the high peaks of the Adirondacks. Yellow gave way to burnt orange, the peaks shading navy to deep purple. The wind fell out altogether and I paddled possessed by the shifting light as the water turned to glass. Indigo and maroon danced slowly. The fluid surface to the west shimmered. Twilight.

I was paddling a solid tempo, endorphin enhanced, when suddenly I realized--it's getting dark fast and I'm two miles from home. Yikes. Swing the board around and head east and south. But something weird was happening in town. House fire!! Or wait... holy crap! Full moon rising from the quiet Vermont landscape --just the fierce yellow dome first outlining the blackness of the treetops, then the orb, the full disk above the trees. Bright. Clear. October night.

I stopped paddling and instinctively looked around wanting to point and exclaim to someone. Anyone. No one? Alone truly on the broad lake. Is anybody else paying attention? Can anyone share this?

I paddled home in glory, moon shining on me. And I was reminded why I do what I do. Sharing. Why would I write this? Why do I make art? Sculpture out of light? Why, when I see a photo of the blue sunset on Mars, do I start telling everyone? Who really needs to know that we have eyes so sensitive we can detect a single photon?

A full moon will rise on Christmas, the next one not until 2034. Share it. Show it to the little kids. I wrote in a blog piece a year ago that the "Force" most important is love, but I would like to add participation to the idea. Share your vision, your voice, your music, your food, your home, your wealth, your gifts, your love. Share this letter, these ideas, as widely as possible.

There are big lights in the sky, sunsets to see, moonrises too. Let's collectively awaken just a little bit more and share our blessings. Be the warmth and brightness. Peace and light, hugs all around,

all best, Bruce

Supernova, Spectre, Silence and SNO

Hi Friends,

There's a lot to cover and I will be brief AND there is a reward at the end so...

Dark Matter, apparently, maybe, makes up 84.54% of the total matter of the universe. This is based on studying the gravitational lensing effect of galaxies bending light from even more distant galaxies. Scientists have actual photographs of a portion of deep, deep space in which the same galaxy is seen at five different places in a single photo. The galaxies doing all that light bending shouldn't have sufficient mass to accomplish this. Therefore, something is helping. Something we can't see. A lot of it. Researchers have been focusing on the Bullet Cluster and the Train Wreck Cluster.

Also, and bear with me here, thermal relic abundance calculations and angular fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, CMB, are mathematically explicable if Dark Matter exists. Essentially, the consistency of the Big Bang echo is lumpy; and cold, warm and hot Dark Matter could explain the large scale structure of the universe with its anomalies.

I went to the new Bond movie and it's fabulous. Just what you expect - helicopter tricks, buildings exploding, fast cars, snappy outfits, evil dudes. It's loud and busy. And fun. When I got home I stood in the backyard. There was no wind. No waves lapping on the rocks. No geese honking. It was profoundly dark. No moon. Low clouds covered the stars. Listening was strangely an activity. Anything...

Nearly a mile underground in Lead, South Dakota is a tank of 815 pounds of liquid Xenon cooled to minus 100 degrees Celsius looking for WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) as experimental evidence of Dark Matter passing by. The Large Underground Xenon detector, LUX, is shielded by a mile of rock to reduce the "noise" of gamma radiation or other stray particles. It is the quietest place known to man. So far we have found no observational evidence of Dark Matter. Naturally we are building the 7 ton LUX-ZEPLIN (also in Lead) to come on line in 2016. Also searching are projects around the globe with names, (and these are only the ones whose acronyms I like) such as EDELWEISS, WARP, DarkSide, PandaX, SNO, IceCube, Double Chooz, SIMPLE and PICASSO.

Mankind is building unprecedented ears and eyes. Read about the James Webb Space Telescope. How is your silence quotient? When was the last time you could truly hear nothing? No sound. I fill my world with music nonstop but there is purity in nothingness. Go find some. Try that snowy evening walk...

And finally, we head into the holidays, a time for family and gifts and thoughtfulness for all our blessings. I want to say a huge thank you to all of you for sharing with me in this journey. 2015 has been a fantastic year! You are the folks who make this all fly and as gratitude I want to offer my current pieces to you for less money than the unwashed masses. Many of you already have my art so please think gifts for your family or friends. I want to end the year with an empty gallery, a clean slate for 2016, so one third off the prices (excluding the Element project) for everything. I love you people. You make this possible and fun.

I will be doing the Red Dot Art Fair in Miami Dec. 2-6th so please contact before then. The prices at the show will be standard. Check the website for "Supernova," "Axial Isinglass," "The Positive," "Power Wall," "One Away," "Sprezzatura," "Beam Steering," and "Salt Whistle." This isn't a sale my friends; it's your reward for sharing these rantings, this vision, this dance.

Blessings and hugs.

all best,

Bruce

Pink Stuff and Tiny Smart Things

Sometime when I polish metal I use rouge as the final buff to bring the surface up to a mirror finish. Rouge, fittingly, is red, pink actually, and is made of stuff, according to my friend Timothy, called diatomaceous earth. (Love that word). It is essentially the fossilized remains of diatoms, those microscopic algae that live in spectacular bi-radially symmetrical sculptures seemingly made by kajillions of tiny glassblowers. Google Image "diatoms" to see what I am talking about. It's great stuff for making dynamite or toothpaste or filtering beer.

The best part is the SiO2--the glass houses they live in. Built into the DNA of these phytoplankton is the nano-scale bio-mechanical blueprint to make offspring exactly the same encased in hard structures made of silicon, oxygen and a small dash of protein. Abalone make shells that are 98% calcium carbonate and 2% protein in a structural, tessellated arrangement that is 3000% stronger than a stone made of the same materials. These are engineered objects. 500
million years ago life spontaneously figured out how to make hard materials.

Researchers have also discovered magnetite or Fe3O4 being used by bacteria and higher life forms like birds and lobsters for magnetoception or navigation using the magnetic fields of the earth. Calcium, silicon and iron assembled by living things to perpetuate their species, or find dates, or both, in a different order I suppose. Calcium is the most abundant metal in the human body and most animals. Silicate minerals make up over 90% of the earth's crust. Iron, well, you know, steel, magnets, in cereal, cruise ships, fry pans... By mass it's the most common element on earth.

My favorite tools in the shop are the ones that I had to make since I NEED them and nobody makes them. I have a six foot compass made of wood, a suction cup and steel pins. Straightedges eight feet long that, as I use them, turn to dust. Clamps, jigs, parallel scribes, (and here you see my 18th century brain at work... might even be 15th century).

As higher life forms we need tools. You have seen the commercial where the guy has trained his dog to fetch beer from the fridge? At MIT a professor has devoted her career to manipulating viruses and bacteria to create things that we need nearly as much as food--solar cells and batteries and fuel. Can we grow batteries? Yep. Fuel cells splitting water into O and H? Yep. Solar cells? Absolutely. We just need to scale this up. She invited Obama to her lab and he has held in his hand a lit LED powered by bacteria and viruses. Imagine self replicating tiny structures complete with wiring built right in. It's happening. If we can just focus more on growing things and a little bit less on burning stuff....

Since 1990, printed right on my business checks is the phrase, "Truth is beauty is magic."

Oh, and did I mention beer? Higher evolution has opened four breweries within close walking distance from my gallery. Stay focused.

And, as always, thanks,
and boogie on...

Flying Dragons

About twenty years ago I read a biography of Miles Davis after seeing him from the front row of the Flynn Theatre in Burlington, Vermont and having my head ripped off with bliss and funk. It was a mind/ear/spirit/horn blowing couple hours compounded by a day spent getting reasonably sunburnt and overly hydrated (say no more) on a sailboat. In the book, Miles described a young brilliant cornetist named Olu Dara as "just other and next." This morning on NPR I heard a blip for Ozy, the online source for "what's new and next." When I clicked over I found it is named for "Ozymandias", a fabulous and favorite poem and the title of a piece that I sold back in February of this year. Miles' phrase has stuck with me all these years as my professional, if formally secret, mission.

Step to the left. Last Friday I was at one of my boy's soccer matches in the middle of north central rural Vermont. As dusk fell during the game and the shadows stretched over the field a fleet of dragon flies were having a seriously uptempo dinner. Dozens of four inch long clicking and whizzing little choppers darted about hunting some invisible hors d'oeurves. They were way better than the pre-season scrimmage going on. I announced to my friends there, "You know dragon flies migrate. Some fly 4000 miles from India to Africa and back." I got the look I always get. The one that says, "Dude, you are making this stuff up."

So, I came home and did my homework. I have always loved these little critters, all brittle and scary, and seemingly built by aeronautical jewelers. Years ago we watched them appear at twilight on a canoe trip in Canada to pluck biting flies right out of the air. Their heads are all teeth and eyeballs. Each eye is 30,000 individual eyes, and because of the size and placement they can see nearly any direction. EVERYTHING is in their field of vision; one researcher believes they can see better than any other creature. They showed up on the planet 100 million years before the dinosaurs. They can fly 30 mph and, with a tailwind, they have been clocked at 80. Fossils exist with a 25 inch wingspan.

Miles' music for me has always had this feeling of perfection. Like Mozart, the theme doesn't feel written. It just is and always was. He "found" it. And then played it. It is timeless. Dragon flies have been around for 300 million years and have changed very little in all that time. Why? Because they are perfect. They are just bugs that can flap 30 beats a second. And hover. Or jet.
Or migrate thousands of miles.

I have found in my life a yearly migration, a cycling from one place to the next with an annual rhythm. Over Labor Day once again I will be standing around chatting about what I do and why. In California, per usual. And the following weekend I will be in New York City with my work and the work of friends: Joel Urruty and Gabriella Firehammer. My mission for years now has been to be "just other and next." I want my art to feel discovered more than composed. Look at Joel's work and one will feel this. The best art is timeless. Miles and flying dragons, every time feels like a blessing, every beat a window into prehistory, the exposed mind of the creator.

Eating Spiders

The New Horizons spacecraft just strolled past Pluto at ten miles a second, cameras blazing. We now have some sweet photos of 11,000 foot mountains that are likely composed of water ice. (Are they making that up? Where did the water come from?) The lack of craters suggests that these are recent geological formations that are 100 million years young, or so. One of the mountains is informally named for one of my childhood heroes whose name has poetically rolled around in my head for decades--Tenzing Norgay. He is the Sherpa who helped Mallory summit Everest. Say that name a few times and don't be surprised if floats in and out of your head. Try Sylvain Chavanel, or Daniel Teklehaimanot, Lars Boom, or .... If you are watching the Tour de France these are familiar names. Weird ones, but fun to say. My fave is from NPR--Ofeibea Quist-Arcton.

But I digress. Intentionally, I suppose, because I'm circling around to the close and familiar from the truly far off and distant. In my yard is a plant that is the only surviving genus of a class of plants that for 100 million years dominated the understory of late Paleozoic forests. It's a weird looking thing that once had cousins that grew to 90 foot tall trees. Equisetum. Reproduces with spores instead of seeds and happens to fix silicates in its stem. And it is the plant that fixates titanium in its tissue more than any other living thing. Titanium is the elegant metal that we are using to make bracelets this summer in the shop AND the correct material for building the SR-71 Blackbird. Fastest plane ever and almost 90% titanium. It has the highest strength to density ratio of any metallic element.

But I digress. It's really about the black raspberries that grow all over the fence next to my house. Turns out that these fixate 10 different metals that we need to keep healthy. And they are free. And right there. And really tart and sweet. Did I mention they spontaneously appear? I've been picking these almost daily, eating all I can stand and then putting the rest in the fridge. Later when I open the container there are plenty of different kinds of little spiders sneaking around in there.

So I'm busy doing my Elements homework, cranking out the heirlooms, watching the Tour and pushing light around in the studio. The deep space probe is telling us all about the farthest dance partners. Meanwhile, these primitive horsetail plants are invading my yard. (The story is Equisetum helped John Napier discover algorithms.) I, apparently, have daily been eating teeny spiders without noticing.

Just trying to get those sweet antioxidants. I will keep you posted when the super powers appear. In the meantime, pay attention. Stop mumbling. Sit up straight. Summer is fleeting.

Friday June 19th - 5 pm Art, 7:30 pm Music

Years ago, could be thirty three give or take, I saw a fantastic Laurie Anderson concert with Adrian Belew on guitar and a moveable stage set of screens and props. Amidst all the melodic electricity was a mini lecture regarding the power of music. She began by showing a binary representation of a number. I think it was the date, just a brief string of ones and zeros. Math is clean and concise. Then, she projected on the backdrop a binary representation of a page of text, Hamlet's soliloquy or a doughnut recipe. Yikes! Lots of ones and zeros. Finally, she justified her career as a musician by projecting a veritable ocean of ones and zero on the backdrop of the stage. "This is the opening four bars of Beethoven's Fifth…"

Please forgive the paraphrasing of an evening of brilliance from decades ago but the concept is profound. Music is an all consuming, all devouring beast at its best. It's an experience of mind/body/spirit. Alan Watts wrote, "To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, 'I am listening to music,' you are not listening."

Music can transport those who are not listening/listening. Handel's Messiah, Sigur Ros, Louis Armstrong, Mozart, Danny O'Keefe, Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny, Eric Clapton, can bring tears, stop time, uplift. The Gospel tent at Jazz Fest in New Orleans can change the way you feel about music forever. Go there. Trust me.

Laurie Anderson was speaking about the volume of communication made possible by music. But the real "crux of the biscuit" is the communication itself - one human mind to another human mind, a purity of communion, a sharing of the same stuff. With rhythm. You don't need to know the words. You just need to give in and let go.

To this end HAVOC gallery is hosting a free concert on Friday, June 19, 5-10 p.m. Party and Art starts at 5 p.m. and concert at 7:30 p.m.

Headwinds

Hello,
:)

Years ago I saw Furry Lewis at the Memphis Blues Festival. He told us he was 92 but a little fact checking shows he was exaggerating by 5 years. Blind, with a wooden leg, he played an electric guitar that looked like a cigar box with a neck. He was grumpy but rocking the blues on stage to a mob of ecstatic fans.

B. B. King passed away a month ago. He was born on a cotton plantation to sharecropper parents, drove a tractor as a teenager for money. After years of playing and singing he worked up to making $85 a week in his early thirties. Later on he won 15 Grammys and became the legend we know today. The King is dead. Long live the King.

I ride my bike a lot. Maybe too much. When I'm cranking along on a road and a car or a truck rolls by just a bit faster than I'm moving I check my six and slide out into the turbulence of the tumbling air and put the hammer down. The fastest anyone has ridden a streamlined, recumbent bike is 83 mph, but the crazy man motorcycle racer Guy Martin (look him up--he rides the Isle of Man TT every year) has ridden 112 mph behind a truck. Drag coefficient increases as a square of speed so with the sweet spot of turbulence…

One of my brothers has told me for years that the point of difficulty is the place where growth occurs. Just this week he wrote, "Nothing is stable, balance is the only way. Doubt haunts the self until it tires of its own voice and withdraws, freeing the energies of possibility to find their potential." Yep, he is a genius and needs to write more, I know. He also introduced me to Clapton and the Allman Bros. so he knows the real sound of the blues. And last week he paddled a 102 miles in 15 hours on a stand up paddle board. Wind and waves.

The goodness of turbulence, my friends, is its ability to pull us up to our potential. Sure, coasting is great too, but you have to suffer to sing the blues. If you truly want to sing, you have to face the dragon trying to eat you. He's got fangs; you have skills you have forgotten about and far more strength than you use day to day. Pull into the turbulence and put the hammer down…

But, "the eagle flies on Friday and Saturday I go out to play…"

Chrono Logical

I was hiking next to the Na'ili'ili-Haele stream and thinking, "Time is a construct." The biggest company in the world is telling us we all need a new watch - the "Watch"- to help us keep track of how much time we spend doing things we should or should not be doing, like sleeping or running or sitting or checking our phones. And I was thinking I don't need to know the time exactly as my boys and I were walking through a bamboo forest in the middle of the classic discussion of "how fast does bamboo grow?" Compared to what? It's the fastest growing plant as we know - some species can grow as much as 3 feet in 24 hours or a millimeter every 2 minutes. That's pretty speedy, for organic stuff. But, cheetahs can hit 60 mph in 4 seconds and a falcon can fly/dive 240 mph.

The bamboo we were surrounded by was up to 60 or 70 feet tall; the tallest species of this giant grass gets up to 130 feet. But we have 6 feet of DNA in the nucleus of every cell in our bodies. And as far as speed goes, our microscopic biomechanical machinery replicating DNA and fabricating protein molecules is without peer - 100 trillion molecules of hemoglobin is being created per second in every person reading this.

So back to Time in the forest of fastest growing plants, bamboo also produces flowers and has the distinction of being the plant with the longest time between blooming. One species only blossoms every 130 years. There we go - fastest and slowest.

Do I need a watch? Do you? There's a guy in Britain named Krzysztof Szymaniec. I'm pretty sure he doesn't. He is the keeper of the "Caesium Fountain," an atomic clock accurate to one second every 158 million years. I hope he takes hikes with his boys. And by the way, uphill of the bamboo forest is a 400 foot waterfall. Take a dip when you get there. Without your watch.

Ice whine and sunshine

"Write about Spring," said my gallery director. Rite. No problem. Let's see - reawakening, pick-ups plunging through rotten ice, daffodils, ice jam flooding, thunder, buds on a hillside as a pale chartreuse mist on the familiar dead sticks, a crocus, an umbrella…Immediately comes the recognition of the local, individual, aspect of this stanza we call spring. Mine is radically different from my cousin's in Virginia or Maui. Literally as I write, the rain this March morning just turned to snow. Vermont! It's falling now with intent, vertically.

So, I won't. Spring is your pivot not my poem. It's personal. It's the moment when exiting the house you don't layer; you put golf clubs/bikes/boats in/on the car; you pause at the top of Nose Dive with acres of corn snow waiting, super hero surfing snow, like butter; your forsythia explodes; you stroll rather than brave the elements; you sow; buffleheads reappear; music returns to the breeze...

The crux is the angle of light. That is what changes and what clicks in us all. For me my whole career hinges on exactly that, the angle of light, that subtle differentiation, diffraction, diffusion. Open wide those eyes my friends. Go walk the dog even if you don't have one. The light is higher and ready for you to notice.

Oh, and just so you know, the snow quit. 

But here in the gallery we have snow continuing. A book full of snowflakes, all 14 created so far by Bruce R. MacDonald, is almost at the printer. We will keep you privy of the release date. For now here is a taste.

Jookin' Wanderers and Baltimore, Maryland

The earth doesn't revolve around the sun. In fact none of the planets do. We all revolve around the center of mass of the solar system which changes constantly. Sometimes it is near the center of the sun and sometimes it's in space around the sun. Technically, that shifting, looping point is called the "barycenter," in case anyone is on Jeopardy tonight. And, relative to the surrounding space, that point is moving 144 miles a second. Thataway. 

Now apply this principle to your life. Your axis is constantly shifting. Work, your partner, your kid(s), your obsessions, your horse, FB, music, skiing, vacation planning… Yeats famously said, "The centre cannot hold." I posit, the center is a fiction. We are just dancing around other stuff dancing around. All the time. I hope you got rhythm.

Dance on over to The American Craft Council Art Fair in Baltimore, February 20-22, Baltimore Convention Center, www.shows.craftcouncil.org/  baltimore. I will be in booth #711 with some hip hop, ballet, krumping, waltz, polka and jookin' collection of Elements and fresh light sculptures.

Tokamaks and Moringas

A few weeks back I mentioned in writing some electromagnets being built in France that were twice the power of a Saturn Five's rocket thrust. Indoors. With an on/off switch. This prompted readers' questions of "what the hell?!" Ever heard of a tokamak? In essence, it is a star in a bottle. The visionary physicists out to solve long term the energy needs of the planet have a project going in the south of France to make a fusion nuclear reactor. All reactors today split atoms, fission, to generate power; and in the process generate nightmarish trash, radioactive by-products that will be toxic to humans and all living things for hundreds of thousands of years. And then there is the toxicity of uranium mining and processing, the preparation of the fuel.

A fusion reactor will basically run on seawater and generate massive amounts of power with no waste products. The challenge being faced is how to contain the hellfire of a star's guts inside a building. The solution is an electromagnetic torus, a tokamak, a doughnut shaped force field of pulsing energy constraining the forces capable of incinerating any material in existence--metals, vaporized; ten foot solid diamond walls, utter toast, instantly. But this power plant is being built, partly the construction project of a forty nation consortium, partly an improbable science experiment. Humans. We can do this.

Meanwhile, in Saharan Africa facing the droughts of climate change, researchers are planting Moringas. It's a tree sourced from India that is fast growing and nearly impossible to kill. "Extremely drought tolerant" is the applicable descriptor here. Its leaves can be eaten raw, cooked, or ground into baby formula. They contain four times the calcium of milk, four times the Vitamin A of carrots, seven times the Vitamin C of oranges, three times the potassium of bananas and 150% the protein of soybeans. Their seeds can be pressed into an olive oil-like unsaturated fat or crushed into a powder that can purify water, the electrolytes in the powder attract impurities and precipitate them out of the fluid. The Moringa is the leading edge of food research to feed all of us and especially those where sweet rainfall is scarce.

So there we go. Farmers and physicists. Saving the world.

Likely none of these folks will read these paragraphs but the strength of their efforts has to reverberate. We can all focus wherever we can to dance forward. Little steps can preface big leaps. You have to love the fact the Wright brothers were bike mechanics first.

And of course Beauty with a capital B. There is a piece of my work hanging on the dining room wall of the director of the Hubble Space Telescope. This makes me happy and hopeful. Science and art. We got this...

Havoc

I looked up the word "havoc" in my desktop Webster's and it's there on the very bottom of the page, five entries below the name of my college. Hmmmm. Anyway its derivation is from Old High German "heffen" meaning "to life up." Also referenced just above "great destruction and devastation," is the definition from Old French and Middle English "to take booty." Now we are talking. Aside from the general understanding we all have of "total chaos" is the notion of "booty" with "havoc." HAVOC is my gallery project to share the talents of some of my artist friends with the rest of you fine people. HAVOC is where one might find "booty" to uplift one's existence. To this end HAVOC Gallery will have a strong presence during The Art Basel week in Miami at Red Dot Art Fair, December 2-7, 2014. www.reddotfair.com. Come see wood, metal photons, glass and air working their magic in booth A108 with HAVOC gallery exhibited artists: Joël Urruty, Sam Stark, Gordon Auchincloss and Bruce R. MacDonald. Attached is complimentary admission for Wednesday and Thursday. See you in Miami to uplift your existence with HAVOC Gallery.

Critters, us and daily courage

The Golden Crested Kinglet is a bird that winters in Vermont foraging in little flocks for the insects that are its only source of food. He weighs as much as a nickel. Dressing in drab camo, he's somewhat hard to find, unless he is riled up and then he sports a crest of brilliant lemon yellow that magically appears on his dusky head. One of his specific survival adaptations to deal with his Siberian winter home is his ability to reduce his heat loss by minimizing his surface area at night. He cuddles with his mates. Snuggling together they handle sub-zero windy nights. And they weigh exactly as much as two dimes.

Big deal you say. Well, this guy is my new hero. Picky, brave, resilient, choosing to stick around rather than move to Miami. Dapper when he wants. Efficient. Sings now and then. Sticks close to the family. If I grow up I want to be like him. Happy Holidays all you fine people. Love, hugs, warmth and may a bounty of bugs to eat come your way in 2015.

Oh yeah, and buy more art. It's part of what makes us humans humans.