Dear Petaluma,

At one point, it was midnight, and I started walking back to 2nd and G Street after a couple hours of red wine and tapas, reading Joan Didion for the first time over at the Speakeasy in Putnam Plaza. Before that, I'd spent a couple of hours roaming Downtown Petaluma, taking pictures of puddles in the night and getting the perfect reflection of the Grocery Outlet sign flipped onto the ground. Carefully closing some of my curtains, I made sure to become an anonymous, unmoving pile. At dawn, I walked out and got to hear the mud flats breathing in pinks and yellows. I picked up some donuts and coffee from a perfect place called Sunrise Donuts over at the unglorified shopping center and ate them on the docks while watching an egret expertly stalking a fish. Even though I'm totally over it, somehow, it was very worth the while.

Semester favorites: James Turrell, Gordon Matta-Clark, Jane Jacobs, Robert Smithson, Diana Balmori, Agnes Denes, Mary Miss, Gaston Bachelard, Joan Didion, and Cedric Price. 

torrent

POEM Of Storms and Tears by Aimee Suzara

excerpt:
...
this kind of a torrent
is less of a tragedy
and more of a relief.

List of antonyms

For every order, a disorder
For every consent, a dissent
For every tragedy, a joy

For every legitimacy, an invisibility
For every answer, a question
For every denial, a request

For every right, a left
For every root, a shoot
For every way, another way

or

For every disorder, an order
For every dissent, a consent
For every joy, a tragedy

For every invisibility, a legitimacy
For every question, an answer
For every request, a denial

For every left, a right
For every shoot, a root
For every way, another way

dis·or·der

It looks like early meanings of disorder were defined by the upsetting of an assumed order versus a lack of order. Even in my room, where entropy wins, there is an order from which the mess comes - a new order where all the different socks are mixed together in a canvas bag, and it takes me 5 minutes every morning to find a matching pair so sometimes I'll mismatch, which leads to more mismatching. But anyways, an order is formed, a new routine of identifying and procuring pairs of socks is established, and by now I've learned to more or less find functional pairs in less than a functional minute.

p.s. this is not meant to be any kind of analogy, this is literally how I create order in my room.

Sublimation

BOOK The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, 1958 (1972 Beacon Press edition)

"Sublimation is the transition of a substance directly from the solid to the gas phase without passing through an intermediate liquid phase." (Wikipedia)

very precise and very little

INTERVIEW with Michael van Gessel via Landzine



The only person I know who could say something was TERRIBLE in such a way where it felt like a blessing to hear it.

Joan and Cedric

BOOKS The White Album by Joan Didion (1979) and Cedric Price: Works II by Architectural Association (1984)

From Joan Didion, 1979:

"The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. Water is important to those who do not have it, and the same is true of control. I tore a poem by Karl Shapiro from a magazine and pinned it on my kitchen wall...

It is raining in California, a straight rain
Cleaning the heavy oranges on the bough,
Filling the gardens till the gardens flow,
Shining the olives, tiling the gleaming tile,
Waxing the dark camellia leaves more green,
Flooding the daylong valleys like the Nile."

Before starting, I toured a few design schools and ended up asking Richard Forman about the role of ethics in landscape architecture. I didn't know what I was asking, but he responded to me as if I did, and I pretended to understand. After having my mind delightfully obliterated by the writings of Joan Didion and Cedric Price this past week, I think I might be starting to get hints of what Forman might have been saying. 

In this case, I don't think ethics in design has to do with the right thing to do, but rather the recognition that every decision comes with a heavy, very invisible bag of values attached to it. Every line that is drawn is weighted down by the bag and everyone's got a different bag. Like the idea that science is a cultural construct, design is an ethically loaded act. Why pretend like it's anything less. 

Let's see. Some words from Cedric Price:

"The consciously planned and purposely built environment that exploits the potential of unevenness of environmental conditioning is likely to become one of the main contributions that architects and planners can make to society..." 

"Instantaneous response to a particular problem is too slow. Architecture must concern itself continually with the socially beneficial distortion of the environment. Like medicine it must move from the curative to the preventive. Architecture should have little to do with problem solving - rather it should create desirable conditions and opportunities hitherto thought impossible." 

ecofarm

CONFERENCE EcoFarm 2015: the hottest farmers around

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You Are My Sunshine

Next January, it'll be my thirteenth semester at UC Berkeley and my thirty-first semester attending public school. Sort of sick and pretty privileged.

And it's the third time an occupation has occurred since I started. Although I've got no hopes of being an occupier, I do hope some of us can slip away and be builders of places for people to occupy and tear apart upon their will. In a way, UC Berkeley has been successful in inspiring folks to do this, just that the idea of the place is very big, heavy and pretty hard to crack in one go. 

The folk song, You Are My Sunshine, perpendicular to the UC's motto, Fiat Lux:

The other night, as I lay sleepin'
Dreamed I held you in my arms
When I awoke dar, I was mistaken'
An' I hung my head an' cried

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine
You make me happy when skies are gray
You'll never know dear, how much I love you
Please don't take my sunshine away

I'll always love you an' make you happy
If you will only say th same
But if you leave me for another
You'll regret it all some day

You told me once't dear, you really loved me
An' no one else could come between
But now you left me for another
You have scattered all my dreams

Villa Prima Facie

PAMPHLET Villa Prima Facie by Lars Lerup, 1978

Checked the 'free pile' at the library today and picked up a sweet thing - a pamphlet about walls. It begins with a quote about blackberries:

On typographical bushes constituted by the poem along a road which leads neither beyond things nor to the spirit, certain fruits are formed by an agglomeration of spheres filled by a drop of ink. 

- Francis Ponge

What does it mean?! 

the power of story

STORY Come Hell or High Water directed by Leah Mahan

A story tonight, notes: the power of storytelling as a conveyance of language that continues to move and connect, the necessity for counter narrative, the blessing of strong relationships, being forever placed within the context of history, constantly rolling. 

Dis-ease of being busy

COLUMN The Disease of Being Busy by Omid Safi

How exactly are we supposed to examine the dark corners of our soul when we are so busy? 

Staying up until 2 in the morning to meet a deadline: desperately gluing little pieces of printed paper to collage an image of Florence Nightingale with her dress, a candle, and a cutout of my face (?) to accompany a biographical report I'd written for submission to the LA County Fair. 18 years later, I am cutting and pasting tedious bits of paper together into the dark hours of the night making god knows what, something to do with psychogeography (?) and sea level rise. It is my habit that I love. When the doing becomes something for the sake of doing though, it dies a little. Maybe this is what dying a little inside means, when the heart and soul are lost. I forget that I'm alive, buried under an epic pile of tasks, so I have to remember why I am doing something, why it might be worth the hours of my life gluing, writing, sitting, that I will never get back. Then it's not about being busy and it becomes easier. It is hopefully a way in, to examine those wonderful dark corners that don't exist anywhere else.

Sea Ranch

TRIP to Sea Ranch

This weekend, I was privileged enough to take a trip to Sea Ranch, a place very far away from here:

My first time here. Windows open straight to the sea, a sliding door that takes you to exactly where you are, fresh caught fish and slow hunted mushrooms. Time set sitting in the comfortable window nook and sipping on tea. It's me and the sea, and studio matters, but it also doesn't. 

Friends at the beach

Introduction

INTRODUCTION The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, 1961

I've just started to read this book.

Excerpt: "Handsome is as handsome does. All that glitters is not gold... There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served."

Plus, Cedric Price's, City As An Egg:

Points of Reference

DOWNTOWN Petaluma

1) June 2006, Eva Joan being launched from the Landing Way Depot
2) March 2013, a guy producing a local feature on downtown

manifesto

MANIFESTO by Agnes Denes in 1969 via Radical Nature (2009) from Barbican Art Gallery

For some reason,  I'm becoming obsessed with material from the 1960s. Here is Agnes Dene's Manifesto from 1969 to loosen it up:

working with a paradox
defining the elusive
visualizing the invisible
communicating the incommunicable
not accepting the limitations society has accepted
seeing in new ways
living for a fraction of a second and penetrating light years
using intellect and instinct to achieve intuition
achieving total self-consciousness and self-awareness
being creatively obsessive
questioning, reasoning, analysing, dissection and re-examining
understanding the finitude of human existence and still striving to create
beauty and provocative reasoning
finding new concepts, recognising new patterns
desiring to know the importance or significance of existence
seeing reality and still being able to dream
persisting in the eternal search


And to pair it with Thích Nhất Hạnh's words, "love is understanding." 

Floating Quotes

QUOTES floating around this week

All that is solid melts into air.

Be here now.

Currently, I am looking for a direction, trying to steer my subconscious into creating a master plan for a town. My subconscious wants to make this master plan out of white porcelain, to look at it, and to drop it on the floor to see where it breaks. I want to open the thing up to itself, watch it flooded by light and air, exposed.

These two quotes have been useful in mediating the impulse.

An Ark Kit Puncture

MORE from Gordon Matta-Clark: The Space Between by James Attlee & Lisa Le Feuvre (2003):

(p. 48) 
    completion through removal
    completion through collapse
    completion through emptiness

"The word Anarchitecture itself merged two apparently conflicting sets of principles - the planned and the spontaneous, the structured and the fluid, the built and the disassembled - and by joining them together held them in balance, setting up a kind of creative tension. The continual puns the members of the Anarchitecture group made about their name - AN ARK KIT PUNCTURE, ANARCHY TORTURE, AN ARTIC LECTURE, AN ORCHID TEXTURE, AN ART COLLECTOR etc - were a demonstration of that the principle of entropy applied as much to language as to the physical world. One can no more rely on a word to retain its meaning over the years than one can a politician his integrity, a building its function or an ideology its validity. The rules that govern language - on the levels of phonetics, semantics or syntax; the divisions between words that render them legible as signs - this architecture of sound and meaning is written on water not on stone. As Duchamp had pointed out, nothing in the universe is at rest."

photos from downtown Petaluma:

The Space Between

PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY of people, water, in drift

From Gordon Matta-Clark: The Space Between by James Attlee & Lisa Le Feuvre (2003):

"Psychogeographers would drift through the urban environment, attuned to subtle changes in the atmosphere of the streets, prompted to change direction by stimuli not immediately apparent to less sensitive observers. The important thing was to get beyond the overarching control of town-planners, politicians and architects, into regions where there existed a unitary ambience: an indefinable combination of lively and colourful inhabitants, light, sounds, activity and architectural backdrop.

Situationist cartography, making use of cutups and collages of existing maps, was highly selective, concentrating on revealing the surviving fragments of the city that had escaped the attention of urban planners and retained their original ambiance and excising the rest."

LED shadows

TRIPPING on shadows

After another long day at school, I began to trip on the shadows on my walk back to the scooter. Shadows will never be the same again.

Good Morning

FROM October in A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold:

"It would seem as if the sun were responsible for the daily retreat of reticence from the world. At any rate, by the time the mists are white over the lowlands, every rooster is bragging ad lib, and every corn shock is pretending to be twice as tall as any corn that ever grew. By sun-up every squirrel is exaggerating some fancied indignity to his person, and every jaw proclaiming with false emotion about suppositious dangers to society, at this very moment discovered by him. Distant crows are berating a hypothetical owl, just to tell the world how vigilant crows are, and a pheasant cock, musing perhaps on his philandering of bygone days, beats the air with his wings and tell the world in raucous warning that he owns this marsh and all the hens in it.

...and finally, at evening, the drone of an untended radio. Then everybody goes to bed to relearn the lessons of the night."

Flexible Industry

Flexible Industry + Local Agricultural Development

Land Management

AERIAL PHOTOS Petaluma River: adjacent conservation easements

Land management, brush strokes

Survivor

CHICKEN Survivor of dog attacks and paranoia

This Bantam chicken has survived a number of potential ends. She used to have a paranoid twin and other wonderful friends who are now buried next to fruit trees in the park. I admire her will to survive and ability to hold on to her sanity. 

stolen cows were spirited away some distance

DEFINITION Spirit




























language is the spirit of the voice, in pencil marks, rhythm of line
the senses come together at this point in time to tell you a secret story
stolen cows sing to you now, sweet illogical harmonies
you, the cows are dancing now, a faint glimmer and into the distance

song and place

CLASS Song and Place w/Tony Dubovsky

I'm taking a class where I get to sing, observe, listen, and draw connections between song and place. Beginning with American roots, our first song is called, Down in the Valley. The song took me back to the Carrizo Plain where I spent time this past summer watching the sky and thinking about catching rain.

words

WORDS of wisdom

In the wise of words of a woman I met this evening - There are two ways to do everything. Learn to do it the second way. 

Don't Let Your Children Grow Up to be Farmers

OPINION Don't Let Your Children Grow Up to be Farmers by Bren Smith via New York Times

Why am I taking out loans to go to grad school? Because I think it's less risky than taking out loans to become a farmer and maybe it'll give me a shot at affording a farm business some day. So twisted is this path. This opinion piece rants about the barriers young people face in pursuing small-scale farming:

The dirty secret of the food movement is that the much-celebrated small-scale farmer isn’t making a living. After the tools are put away, we head out to second and third jobs to keep our farms afloat. Ninety-one percent of all farm households rely on multiple sources of income. 

A Tourist's View

ESSAY A Tourtist's View of Marriage by Esther Perel

An insightful read on the Third Reality that is constructed and negotiated between partners of cultural difference. 

"Another way to conceive of the spectrum is individualism versus collectivism. In low context societies such as Germany, the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, England, Australia, and the United States (often countries rooted in Protestant Calvinism), people compartmentalize personal relationships and work, and focus on short-term relationships. Factual information is stressed, as is explicit verbal expression. The high-context societies are more rural and less industrialized than the low-context societies. In Latin America, Africa, the Mediterranean countries, the Arab world, India, China, and Indonesia, extensive information networks exist among family, friends, and colleagues. This shared experience allows for a greater degree of tacit understanding. People are often involved in close and lasting relationships."

In an age of mobility and constant crossing, how will our generation adapt to living out simultaneous realities? 

A Strange New Cottage

POEM A Strange New Cottage by Allen Ginsberg

Illustration by my uncle of the cottage he built in the mountains in Taiwan.

A Strange New Cottage

    All afternoon cutting bramble blackberries off a tottering brown 
fence
    under a low branch with its rotten old apricots miscellaneous under 
the leaves,
    fixing the drip in the intricate gut machinery of a new toilet;
    found a good coffeepot in the vines by the porch, rolled a big tire out
of the scarlet bushes, hid my marijuana;
    wet the flowers, playing the sunlit water each to each, returning for
godly extra drops for the string beans and daisies;
    three times walked round the grass and sighed absently;
    my reward, when the garden fed me its plums from the form of a small tree in the corner,
an angel thoughtful of my stomach, and my dry and lovelorn tongue. 

Living a block and 50 summers away from the setting of this poem, I wonder what draws me to this place - scenes of Berkeley in the summer, tucked away behind a mess of plum branches and leaves back lit by the sun. Music echos with the sound of construction and brown carpet silent under my feet. With a precious number of summers ahead, I wonder where I'm headed and what kind of fruit I'll have to eat. 

Gentrification and the Urban Garden

ARTICLE Gentrification and the Urban Garden via The New Yorker

Regarding development in West Oakland and neighboring areas. The issue of gentrification here brings up the question of how survival-based practices and craft have become objectified, packaged, and sold to boutique buyers at the expense of others. Urban gardening, farming, and beekeeping - these productive practices come from a history of struggle and celebration, not really from magazines or cute shops (as much as I love them). 

Failing

NOTHING like trying to drive a big old van that strikes deep fear into my heart every time I get to a stop sign.

If anything, I'm thankful for this time to make glorious mistakes, to learn, and to be on some kind of adventure, even if it's as hard as getting into first gear on a gentle uphill slope (so hard)! This past year has been like this - dedicating every day to work through, in a slow and desperate way, the difficulties of doing something new - a true challenge. If not for people who have kept me inspired and feeling grateful, I probably wouldn't be strong enough to fail and be happy for it. Happy summer!

Omg help! I'm going to stall out again! @ China Camp State Park, San Rafael

Happy May 11, 2014

Happy May 11, 2014!

The Last Stretch

ANIMATION Van Life by Parachute Creative Group



Turning 27 this month and ready to let go of some stuff - literal stuff and figurative stuff - to pare down to a basic pile and keep only what fits - into a van.

vandwelling woman

VIDEO Vandwelling Woman



I can only hope to be this cool. Also, there is an incredible amount of vanlife/tiny home info out there, including: Architecture & Building via Kirsten Dirksen.

Growing Cities

DOCUMENTARY Growing Cities: Urban Farming in America/"America"

via the Institute of Urban Homesteading (urban homesteading: sounds expensive and totally out of reach, especially in the Bay Area - what's the secret?)

Tuesday, April 8th, doors open at 6PM
4274 24th Street, Oakland at the New Parkway Theater, with couches
Tickets $8: here

I love this kind of stuff, but honestly, how can this kind of culture persist in the Bay Area where land is exceedingly expensive? In places like West Oakland for example, a place that researchers prescribe to be in all manners deficient, people who propose improvements need to deal with the reality that West Oakland is one Bart stop away from the Financial District of San Francisco, where condos are going for a million dollars a piece. It's like heating an oiled pan and pretending like there's no egg to fry.

The Man Who Planted Trees

FILM The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono (1953) animated by Frédéric Back (1987)

Realized Cat Utopia or Simulated Cat Utopia

Dotspotting

VISUALIZATION Dotspotting

Real time data sets ---> dot map

Ugh.

what we need is here

As opposed to attempting utopia -

WHAT WE NEED IS HERE by Wendell Berry

Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye, 
clear. What we need is here.

Berkeley Distinguished Fellow

VIDEO Berkeley Distinguished Fellow, Aileen Suzara

What is the senior's utopia?

PAPER Utopian Characteristics of Senior Living Developments

References

Simone de Beauvoir: The Coming of Age

Victor Regnier (USC): Design for Assisted Living - Guidelines for Housing the Physically and Mentally Frail

Clare Cooper-Marcus: Easter Hill Village 

Judith Ann Trolander: From Sun Cities to the Villages - A History of Active Adult, Age-restricted Communities

Ross Cortese: Leisure World

Odelay

shadow model

Svenkst Tenn

Ecology and Space

CONFERENCE Ecology and Space

via UC Berkeley Center for Japan Studies - 
 
Resisting the objectification of nature as mere symbol or metaphor, the concept of ecology insists on new modes of reading, writing, and thinking about the material environment that connects the human to the organic world. The international dimensions of ecological questions are particularly suited to considering Japan within the broader fabric of the global environment:

natural disaster
geopolitics
human geography
agriculture
urban space and ecolog
architecture and the environment
film and visual art
literary ecocriticism
environmental aesthetics
environmental history
soundscape and affect 

 

point line plane 4ever

If time was not linear, what could we see?

Sea Level Rise and Local Development

EVENT Sea Level Rise and Local Development

Thursday, February 6th
SPUR Urban Center
645 Mission Street, San Francisco

via the Urban Land Institute:  

Sea level rise threatens more than 281 square miles of Bay Area shoreline. By 2100 more than 270,000 residents, 333 square miles of land and $62B of property will be at risk of inundation. Capital sources and insurers are now evaluating and underwriting this very real risk to their portfolios and considering how to appropriately hedge or price for the future impacts. To address the risk of a rising tide; policy makers, capital markets, and developers are working together to assess potential impacts and develop tools for creating better, more resilient communities. To learn how inundation will affect Bay Area coastal development construction, finance, and policy; join the Urban Land Institute for a panel discussion, featuring stakeholders across multiple disciplines. 

Kiley: February 6, 1982

EXCERPTS from The Work of Dan Kiley: A Dialogue on Design Theory

Little excerpts from the proceedings of the First Annual Symposium on Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia:

 

Starting Up

LINKS to Startup Resources at UC Berkeley

C E N T E R S
Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology (engineering)
Lester Center for Entrepreneurship (business)
Berkeley Startup Cluster

I N C U B A T O R S
SkyDeck
Foundry@Citris
Free Ventures
QB3 (biosciences)

O T H E R
Startup@Berkeley


For fun, I'm going to juxtapose the above with the below:

NIGHT HIGHWAY NINETY-NINE by Lew Welch

...only the very poor, or eccentric, can surround themselves with shapes of elegance (soon to be demolished) in which they are forced by poverty to move with leisurely grace. We remain alert so as not to get run down, but it turns out you only have to hop a few feet, to one side, and the whole huge machinery rolls by, not seeing you at all.