Engineer's Daughter

the birth of photography

In the spirit of the exhibition at RayKo Khris and I hope to make it to next week, I direct your attention to this gallery of photos, all taken before 1910, that are currently on display (for a few more days anyway) at Galerie Livet in Normandy.  The gallery is owned by Brigitte and Marc Pagneaux, who moved to the countryside from Paris:

Only half the 75 photographs on show are for sale, in keeping with the Pagneuxs’ twin activity of combining a personal collection with the business side of Livet Ltd. Pagneux called the show Trois ou quatre choses que je sais d’elle, la photographie (three or four things I know about photography). "It’s a reference to my irritation at a current trend that wants to make photography a purely documentary exercise, with everything worth the same and masterpieces belittled as mere inventions of money-grubbing traders," he says.

I love sepia-toned images of buildings like the one above, popular subjects in the early days of photography because at least they didn't move and blur the exposure.  The picture of Victor Hugo in exile, taken in 1853, is pretty amazing too.

In other news, the second part of my interview with Timothy Buckwalter went up yesterday, full of all sorts of salacious details about how I DJ.  And tonight I'm jetting down to LA, to spend a couple days in the sunshine and to take a trip to the dump.  I'll report back from the other side!

this is not a testimony

In case you don't recognize him, let me tell you that this fellow is our fine EPA chief Stephen Johnson, currently being accused by four Senate Democrats of nothing less than perjury, specifically of reversing his decision about California's greenhouse gas emissions waiver at the request of the White House.  From Grist:

In a letter to the attorney general, the senators wrote, "[W]e believe that there is significant evidence to suggest that Mr. Johnson has provided statements that are inconsistent with sworn testimony and documents provided in connection with an investigation conducted by this committee." In that testimony, given earlier this year, Johnson claimed he alone made the decision to deny California's requested waiver. "[T]his was solely my decision based upon the law, based upon the facts that were presented to me," he said. However, former EPA official Jason Burnett recently testified that Johnson was set to issue a partial waiver until he changed his mind amid pressure from the White House. The senators also accused Johnson of succumbing to White House pressure to delay the decision on whether greenhouse-gas emissions endanger public health or welfare.

Nothing surprises me about this administration anymore.  I'm still depressed.

corbusier's career

Germaine Greer's mention of the Villa Savoye in the piece that I quoted yesterday brought images of Le Corbusier's buildings dancing into my head.  Incredibly influential to modernist architecture, he has unfairly gotten a bad rap for his supposed spawning of a thousand concrete housing developments, but I've been a fan ever since the first time I saw a picture of his Unite d'Habitation in Marseilles.  A touring exhibition called Le Corbusier - The Art of Architecture is currently in Lisbon and will travel to Liverpool and then on to London at the end of 2008 and in early 2009.  He was an extraordinarily complex thinker, and Steve Rose appreciates that as much as I do:

Perhaps the most contradictory thing about Le Corbusier, however, is that he never really contradicted himself at all. Despite appearing to change his mind repeatedly, he was doggedly consistent in many respects. He continually strove to transcend the material and to improve the spirit of humanity. He carried beliefs in proportion and harmony throughout his life. You might say that his talent was broad enough to absorb and resolve opposing forces - to turn the contradictory into the complementary. And that, surely, is what makes him a great artist.

Only a fraction of his designs were ever realized, and one might argue some of them, like his idea to replace most of the Right Bank in Paris with skyscrapers, were never intended to do anything more than provoke:

"His grand plans and visions are more interesting for the way they didn't work than the way they did, but the buildings he completed show an architect who towers above everyone," said Sunand Prasad, president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, which is staging the show. "Being inside a Corb building is a thrill. It is like watching Pelé play football."

Meanwhile Phaidon has just published a literal giant of a monograph called Le Corbusier Le Grand, some images from which you can see here.  I have plans to go leaf through it in the SFMOMA museum store, if they'll let me.

germaine greer on new housing

In Britain, plans are in the works to build 10 new so-called eco-towns across the UK, and in yesterday's Guardian Germaine Greer weighed in with her opinion on this current wave of eco-housing.  In a word, she finds it horrible.  I don't think she's looking at the same kind of buildings that appear on blogs like Inhabitat, because the green architecture they showcase does rule.  Without any pictures associated with Greer's online story it's hard to know for sure, but it sounds like these proposed eco-houses are trying too hard to blend in with the sort of sad British suburban architecture that nearly killed me when I was living there:

It is already pretty clear that the developers of the dreaded eco-towns are uninterested in design and terrified of innovation, and probably for good reason. The British, like other timid mammals, are neophobic - that is, irrationally terrified of the new. Eco-housing will have to work differently without looking different. Solar heating panels are best installed en masse on flat roofs, but no one has dared to design detached dwellings with flat roofs since the failure of the Frinton Park project in Essex in the 1930s. If you are thinking eco-house, the Villa Savoye is a better model than a Devon fisherman's cottage. The new eco-houses should be proud to be different. So far, the difference is in hidden extra cost; if less energy was spent on faking sameness, the costs could be kept down. If you are building a house out of hemp and sheep's wool, it is a pointless extravagance to trick it out in stone.

It's true that I've always been a fan of seeing the straw in a straw-bale house.  Greer's piece is also worth reading for her sassy take on the history of ugly housing, how the picturesque grass-roofed cottages of yore might have been pretty but they were also more often than not surrounded by manure.  So given the opportunity to move into homes that might not be so nice to look at but that offered comfort and convenience, citizens jumped at the chance.  And now we're used to the serious ugly.

croupier

Lutz Becker, Blumes Hof, Berlin, 1958 (UK). When I travel I like to find city nooks like this courtyard, where I can eat my morning pastry or just sit and get my head together if I need a break.  I love the detail of the row of garbage bins in this particular photo; you know people actually live near there.  Becker directed political and art documentaries like Art in Revolution and Double Headed Eagle, but the film of his I'd really like to see is the 5-minute short Horizon he made with electronics engineer Ben Palmer in the mid-'60s.  They "explored ways in which visual effects could be created through utilizing a feedback circle between .. TV cameras and monitors" in an attempt to create a visual equivalent to electronic music.  Sadly, it's not on YouTube.  I already checked.

More Tuesday fun: The first part of Timothy Buckwalter's interview with me is up on his site, wherein I relate some of my music-filled history.  Also be sure to check out the musical obsessions of C-Monster, Kimberly Johansson and Richard Winchell.  I am so looking forward to the rest of this series.

postcards from the past

I have always had a love affair with postcards, both sending them and receiving them.  There's something so marvelous about getting a cool image in the mail, with a few fun lines on the back from a friend who was thinking of you.  A few months ago I posted about how much I was enjoying Postcrossing, but shortly after that I let my participation drop off as I was having trouble finding interesting things to say to complete strangers.  I still collect postcards obsessively though, especially artsy or unique ones, and these vintage cards are just awesome.  Men wearing barrels!  Hawaiian music girls!  Scandalous seaside imagery! 

In other news, the fabulous Timothy Buckwalter is running a series on his blog this week about the songs that get stuck in our heads, the earworms that we find ourselves having to listen to over and over again.  His first post features Paul Anka's groovy version of "Black Hole Sun" by Soundgarden, and there will be lots more good stuff to come in succeeding days, including a Q&A with yours truly about music.

show 91

playlist

a small miracle

I prefer my sappy romances with a twist.  A gay twist, to be precise.  In Thomas Bezucha's Big Eden a New York artist returns to his home town in Montana to help care for his ailing grandfather, and even as he struggles with his feelings for his old (straight) best friend it's entirely clear to his fellow townspeople who he should really end up with.  Their gentle scheming provides some of the funniest and most touching moments in the film, and I sniffled quite a bit at the end.  I also have a powerful desire to take a small road trip through some distant mountainous landscapes now.

I got to see some of the mountains that are close by earlier today when my parents and Aimee and I drove to Woodside to see AtmosTheatre's fantastic production of Amy Freed's Freedomland, performed in the company's gorgeous outdoor space.  The play itself tells the story of three adult siblings as circumstances conspire to bring them together at their eccentric father's house, where it becomes clear that each child developed a distinctly different coping strategy after being abandoned by their mother.  One daughter becomes a successful painter of hobo clowns, the other an unpublished scholar of Greek epic poetry, and the son a very particular kind of patriot.  I adored all the discussion of art and myth, and the ensemble cast works beautifully together, delivering some hilariously funny (and raunchy) lines and real emotion besides.  I highly recommend seeing the whole play in the AtmosTheatre woods, but they will also be performing a small piece of it at the SF Theater Festival tomorrow afternoon if you'd like a free taste. 

I, however, will be DJing:

3 - 6pm PST, Sunday, July 27

KALX Berkeley 90.7fm

This will be my last show in the Sunday afternoon slot for the foreseeable future, so do tune in or stream the station if you can!  Where I'll turn up next, nobody knows...

west foot forward

Left coast, indeed.  The Western Climate Initiative, a big carbon-trade partnership of which California is a member, has just unveiled a new scheme to help curb greenhouse gases, hopefully to kick off in 2012.  From Grist:

The 11 states and provinces involved -- Arizona, British Columbia, California, Manitoba, Montana, New Mexico, Ontario, Oregon, Quebec, Utah, and Washington -- would impose an as-yet-undetermined greenhouse-gas emissions limit on industries and utilities, then allow laggards to purchase carbon credits from those that cleaned up their acts. States and provinces would decide individually whether to freely hand out credits or to auction them. Reactions to the draft proposal were mixed; industries craved more detail, while environmentalists expressed concern that companies would be allowed to offset up to 10 percent of their emissions and that transportation and heating fuels would not be regulated until 2015. After a period of public comment, the final proposal is due in September; state and provincial governments will have to OK the plans before they become official.

Of course industries want more detail, those stallers.  Let's get on it, people!  2012 already seems like it's not soon enough.

24 hours in pictures

After my antics last night I'm too fried to say anything intelligible, so I'll just look at pretty photos instead.  I'm a big fan of newspapers' online "Day in Pictures" features because they often activate my curiosity to delve further into news stories and because I very much apppreciate a well-captured shot.  This set is a good example, even though it's two weeks old now, with everything from a bullfighter goring to an adorable smile at a Macedonian wedding to those extreme nappers at right.  Man I so want to go snooze in Yerba Buena Gardens myself right now.  Zzzzzzzzz.