dry skin in the winter time

skin, dry, eyes, hardened, eyes, closed, heart, beat

Observations at the airport

Hands holding rectangles
Thumbs silently slide against glass
Heads pitched down
Eyes absorbing
Ears are covered with foam circles held together by a plastic headband
Tap tap on glass
Look up look down
Tap tap tap

Caffe Med is Closed

It's hard to hear that Caffe Med is closed. It was a place in Berkeley I could go alone and feel comfortable. Nothing about it was polished or clean, which was the relief I got from it. Every surface of every thing and person there was etched and scratched and stained so that there was texture. The floors had a faint smell of being always dirty, like an olfactory history for the subconscious side. And so a person never felt judged there and could just write or sit or talk without needing to examine their self worth. Any unwanted person could enter and stay. The cookies were a dollar. And a pancake was a dollar in the year 2016. Caffe Med was where I wrote most my academic work, and so I'm glad I got to be there and benefit from its magic, have it in memory.

division

privilege exercised with weightless blindfolds
never knowing the not having
or having forgotten

on the other side

remembering loss
always knowing loss
and never taking the painful gains for granted

paints, plants, cats

TEXTURES from Nayarit

grind or float
a false choice

rest, work
false choice

dream, wake
eat or breathe

watercolors bleed

dark futurity

ESSAY A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be by Ursula K. LeGuin (1982)

"Our final loss of faith in that radiant sandcastle may enable our eyes to adjust to a dimmer light and in it perceive another kind of utopia... dark, wet, obscure, weak, yielding, passive, participatory, circular, cyclical, peaceful, nurturant, retreating, contracting, and cold."

fake furniture

to take
or
to make

well,
fake

a midcentury modern
_________________ (blank)

as to become

a millennial contemporary
_____________________ (blank)

eggyego

fried ego for breakfast

1. ego
2. non-stick pan
3. salt

kinetic fields + fun

TIDE by SKY

tomorrow is the harvest moon festival

time to harvest the crop
to grind it down, dry it out and store
for days ahead

the moon will be full

architecture in details

ARCHITECT Carlo Scarpa

new forms old techniques, details

Laundry to Landscape

LAUNDRY to Landscape

spatial regulators

ARTICLE Architectural Exclusion: Discrimination and Segregation Through Physical Design of the Built Environment by Sarah Schindler via Yale Law Journal

"There is no such thing as a neutral design."

the moon tonight

The moon tonight is a summer solstice strawberry one. It's rising opposite the sun, right now.

coasting

COASTING in California

 

Finally, I've graduated to the prestigious position of Coastal Bum and have been awarded a 2-month domestic fellowship in noncompetitive sleeping, reading, and wandering about. (The garden of another dreamer, Ganna Walska Lotusland, pictured above in Montecito, CA).

right to left, right to left

EXCERPT from The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac, 1958

With my sneakers it was as easy as pie to just dance nimbly from boulder to boulder... Don't think. Just dance along. It's the easiest thing in the world, actually easier than walking on flat ground which is monotonous. The cute little problems present themselves at each step and yet you never hesitate and you find yourself on some other boulder you picked out for no special reason at all. 

gift

In logical terms, it seems that loss should result in less. The exception would lie in the mistake of accounting - of what had been accounted for at the time prior to loss. It is in some rare cases that the experience of loss results not in less, but more; it is the most painful and illogical kind. This kind of a loss works to disintegrate any expectation of what one did or did not have in the first place. It renders a harsh realization that one had been left with everything and more, that the account of normalcy prior had been false. The guise of normalcy, rather, had been diligently produced second by second, nearly to a billion, to form a kind of quiet immensity, incomparable in value. In spite of expectations, a person is left with unimaginably more.

final final

FINAL Final Presentation

a combustible landscape as a function of fuel, wind, dryness, topography, and ignition, why not

Issue 5 Launch Party

PARTY Ground Up Journal Issue 5 Release Party

Celebration of all the work having gone into Berkeley's premier landscape architecture journal - talking about borders, boundaries, margins, layouts, em dashes, box files, sewers, colors, and all kinds. 

Iteration No. 1

MUSEUM of Contemporary Combustion

Trying to draw out a fun and didactic landscape which is abstracted from the process of combustion - as a function of fuel, wind, topography, moisture, ignition. 

If music is at all an indication of the times, well, here we are.

We're in a mental age
of manipulated ether.
It's all in your head
success and sickness.
A real digital tradition
for a new mental code
suspended in commercial clouds.

Environmental Design Library

LIBRARY Research

One of the things I will miss most upon graduation from this institution is access to the library. Imagined moments, reveries, and neural pathways, owed to this library. 

Excerpts from my search today -

"From the candle to the lamp there is for the flame something like a conquest of wisdom. The flame of a lamp, thanks to man's ingenuity, is now disciplined. It is given over completely to its task, both simple and lofty, as giver of light... this humanized flame."
from The Flame of a Candle by Gaston Bachelard (1961)

"Why is it that the people who live in the city aren't trusted? Fire is primal for warmth, cooking, and ambient and focal glow. The steel drum has outgrown the backyard barbecue in these parts; on its side or stood on end, a blaze can be set and the smoking started."
from Urban Diaries by Walter Hood (1997)

"In warning against the studying of matter as an object (as in the scientific experiment), Bachelard insisted instead on the development of a deeply sensual knowledge of the world, from how one lives or experiences it."
from James Corner's Ecology and Landscape as Agents of Creativity (1997) via Projective Ecologies edited by Chris Reed and Nina-Maria Lister (2014)

"The artist must come out of the isolation of galleries and museums and provide a concrete consciousness for the present as it really exists, and not simply present abstractions or utopias... we should begin with an art education based on relationships to specific sites. How we see things and places is not a secondary concern, but primary."
quote by Robert Smithson via LAND ART A Cultural Ecology Handbook edited by Max Andrews (2006)

"Art touches our souls because it comes from our souls."
from the Foreward by Stanley Tucci via New York's Underground Art Museum by Sandra Bloodworth and William Ayres (2014)

- today, where the apocalypse and two presidential candidates repeatedly came up in a single sentence, it's nice to have a library to take temporary refuge.

The Moon is Down

SHORT BOOK The Moon is Down by John Steinbeck, 1942

Lesson: when the moon is down, it is only temporary. 

"Free men cannot start a war, but once it is started, they can fight on in defeat. Herd men, followers of a leader, cannot do that, and so it is always the herd men who win battles and the free men who win wars."

MEDIUM BOOK The Grass Harp, 1945 by Truman Capote

Lesson: don't know

"It would be nice to see my first loves again what is there? a dry honeycomb, an empty hornet's nest, other things, or an orange stuck with cloves and a jaybird's egg - when I loved those love collected inside me so that it went flying about like a bird in a sunflower field."

Landfill Park

LA COUNTY Puente Hills Landfill Park proposal

Of course, this is the first I've heard of it, and from my mom. It's a conversion from the country's largest and deepest landfill into the newest addition of the LA County Regional Park system. What a dream to design a giant slide atop a 500-foot tall pile of unstable, decaying matter which holds within it a lifetime of your own personal waste.

contours

LEARNED to make contours!

Terrain workflow/tutorial here

judgmental LA

MAP Judgmental Map of Los Angeles via judgmentalmaps.com

Unfounded comments on the "Judgmental Los Angeles" map - this uncensored mental map (not pictured above) gives a humorous look at why Los Angeles is sort of a relief to be in (outside of the traffic). I'd argue it's evidence that LA is more ecological and sustainable than any other ol' town doomed for all the LEED points and green pretty acronyms in the world. A list that unsuccessfully articulates why - spontaneity, room to exist, equitably mutual authentically discriminate, still together, respect, microclimate, boundaries, lost in translation, new with old, resourceful, opportunistic, dynamic, transparent, imperfect. In reference to the above diagram: of course people are not birds.

Rowland Heights, 1942

PLACE Rowland Heights did not exist in 1942, exactly

It's hard to imagine that this place existed before we did, before Hong Kong Supermarket, before 99 Ranch, before it was legal for Chinese people to be there.  In 1942, this place was simultaneously shifting -- simultaneous to World War II, the Holocaust, Japanese occupation, the Chinese Exclusion Act -- all perfectly pushing and pulling people in time and space to form what is Rowland Heights now taken at face value.  Rowland Heights is somewhat of a miracle from the perspective of a 1942 map. 1942, when Diamond Bar was a geological feature, named after sediment deposits along Brea Creek.  As was the hills, the heights, ranches, and rodeos -- they were real, too, in 1942. 

1942 Anaheim Quadrangle via the War Department

vegetables and plants

BOOK Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings by Jorge Luis Borges (1964)

p. 89  "The execution was set for March 29th, at 9:00 A.M. This delay (whose importance the reader will grasp later) was owing to the desire on the authorities' part to proceed impersonally and slowly, after the manner of vegetables and plants."

- themes for delightful mind bending -

probability and infinity
working dream
false time
symmetry

p. 91  "Hladik felt the verse form to be essential because it makes it impossible for the spectators to lose sight of irreality, one of art's requisites."

- fun thoughts on irreality -

if 

All time was occurring in a simultaneous moment.

All time was occurring in imagination. 

All time was encapsulated in memory.

Part of the time was occurring in a simultaneous moment, the rest was part of a linear history somehow.

Part of the time was occurring in imagination, the rest was purely physical somehow.

Part of the time was encapsulated in memory, the rest was never captured somehow.

All space was occurring in a simultaneous moment.

All space was occurring in imagination.

All space was encapsulated in memory. 

Part of space was occurring in a simultaneous moment, the rest was part of a linear history somehow.

Part of space was occurring in imagination, the rest was purely physical somehow.

Part of space was encapsulated in memory, the rest was never captured somehow.

All experience was occurring in a simultaneous moment.

All experience was occurring in imagination.

All experience was encapsulated in memory.

Part of experience was occurring in a simultaneous moment, the rest was part of a linear history somehow.

Part of experience was occurring in imagination, the rest was purely physical somehow.

Part of experience was encapsulated in memory, the rest was never captured somehow. 

Birds

TOWN Bodega Bay























Hitchcock got it right
Turning a common little thing into a worst nightmare
Turning every look toward rational suspicion
Turning foggy Bodega Bay into a bird war

[cheep cheep cheep]

post notes: Bodega Bay is to Cornwall, England, as is the bird to the kamikaze plane -- the film, The Birds (1963), was based on a book, which was inspired by the events of World War II, which was inspired by --

Professor

CAT in a van: Professor

orange curtain notes

RESEARCH Design for Combustible Landscapes




curtain 
"a piece of material suspended at the top to form a covering or screen"
"that can be raised or lowered at the front of a stage"
"a disastrous outcome"
"to conceal, to shield"

The Orange Curtain 
slang for the Puente Hills that separate Orange County from LA County

clearance dimensions
30'
50'

five methods for brush clearing
prescribed fire
mechanical brush removal
chemical application
biological control
hand clearing

via County of Los Angeles Fire Department
Fuel Modification Plan Guidelines: A Firewise Landscape Guide for Creating and Maintaining Defensible Space
Fire Hazard Reduction Programs