Davidson Woods

November 3, 2007 – Piney Mountain
Anne and Chuck submitted on January 14, 1970
Our stay on South Mountain so far has reflected the occupancy of a new home, or one at least new for us. The little five-year old log house has its share of bumps and warts that need correcting to turn it into a proper home. So, we have had plenty to do. First we cleaned. Then we sanded and sealed. Chuck built stair rails and Anne bought good used furniture here and there. We also contacted old friends in York to let them know our status and meet. We began attending the Unitarian church in Gettysburg.
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BLOG TITLEBLOG CONTENTOur stay on South Mountain so far has reflected the occupancy of a new home, or one at least new for us. The little five-year old log house has its share of bumps and warts that need correcting to turn it into a proper home. So, we have had plenty to do. First we cleaned. Then we sanded and sealed. Chuck built stair rails and Anne bought good used furniture here and there. We also contacted old friends in York to let them know our status and meet. We began attending the Unitarian church in Gettysburg. We have made numerous visits to Chuck’s parents, and they have come to South Mountain a couple of times too. Our reunion with them has warmed our hearts. All this activity has been good, but it has kept us from hiking and birding. Today, for the first time, we took a walk from our new home into the wild. Anne announced last evening that we should hike today. It was to be a chilly but beautiful day. Chuck looked at the map and decided we should walk to the Appalachian Trail. And so we did. The plan was to follow a compass heading of 290 degrees from the gate on the state forest Piney Mountain Ridge Road to the Birch Run Shelter. We know this shelter well. We first visited the old shelter that was tired. It was replaced about five years ago with a lovely and airy new one. The shelter is situate a few yards from the headwaters of Birch Run, a splendid sandy mountain stream that hosts waterthrushes, Acadian flycatchers, and barred owls in season. It seemed very appropriate that we should visit the AT and the Birch Run Shelter on our first hike from our new home. The morning dawned clear and brisk; not quite frosty on the top of Piney Mountain ridge but surely so in the valleys. We enjoyed a bowl of cereal and a cup of coffee as the day brightened. Yellow rock oak and the red maple leaves fluttered in a stiff breeze. Indeed, we were dressed in layers as we walked up our lane to the Shippensburg Road “highway.” Another hundred yards took us to the ridge road where we turned off the pavement and up to the gate. There Chuck looked at the compass, and we turned into the forest. At the ridge-top the forest is mostly of chestnut, scarlet, red, and white oaks. A few maples and black gum add to the mix. The understory is green with mountain laurel interspersed with various blueberries and huckleberries. We found the going rugged, but not too bad as we descended the Piney Mountain ridge. Our new home is on South Mountain, or in the South Mountain complex. Piney Mountain is the southernmost ridge of the South Mountain complex. Our hike was to take us down the Piney Mountain ridge and across the narrow valley separating it from the main ridge of South Mounatin. Near the bottom we crossed the Caledonia – Pine Grove Furnace Road, named for the two state parks it connects. The popular camping and picnic parks are along streams in the valley. At Pine Grove Furnace is a Revolutionary War era iron furnace and a lovely lake for swimming and paddling. Our route took us across the divide between the streams leading to the two parks. Still the path crossed low country where white pine, hemlock, maples, and tulip trees replaced the oaks. We crossed barriers of rhododendron and boggy areas before climbing the next ridge. Rough going in places, but great scenery. We climbed over an intermediate ridge named Ram Hill and descended a grand talus slope. The oyster rocks were covered with large lichens and wiggled a bit as we crossed them. Coming down, Chuck said we should cross a powerline, but none appeared before we reached the gravel Birch Run Road. So, we turned on the road to return to our heading. Rather than cross the right-of-way and then resume our cross country trek, we took the path under the towers. Chuck said we should cross the first stream, ascend the next rise and then follow level ground to the right to reach the shelter. The right-of-way was in scrub oak, but an ATV and walking path made the going easy. Crossing the first hollow, Anne pointed out that there was no stream. Chuck couldn’t make sense of this so we ascended the next rise and then descended a larger valley. The climb up the opposite side was very tough. The valley was so low that the trees were not cleared from the right-of-way there. The path was minimal. On reaching a top we walked into the woods again to maintain our level. Our walk took us to a forest road and again - the powerline. We paused and noticed a group of boy scouts up the road to the right. We wandered over to see what they were up to and found that they were on the Appalachian Trail. We immediately realized that we should have left the powerline after the first draw. The drought had left the stream bed dry. Now we had already crossed the main stream on which the shelter was located and this is why we had to climb so steeply. We were on the “Big Flat” section of the main ridge of South Mountain. So, we chatted a bit with the scouts and a pair of passing bow-hunters and then walked the AT about a quarter mile to the shelter. Missing the shelter by a quarter mile on a three-mile walk was a bit embarrassing, but it is hard to maintain a good heading in a thick forest. The shelter looked as fine as when we had last seen it a few years ago. A family was taking lunch at the picnic table. We took ours at the fire ring and reviewed the shelter log. It had records going back to 2005, but the log had been lost and recovered, so there were no reports of the 2006 season. Anne had hoped to see notes from some of the hikers we had met last year on our long walk in Georgia and North Carolina. No such luck. Chuck walked down to the lovely brook in the rhododendrons but found it dry. Sad. No water at this shelter this fall. We made our return on trails and forest roads. Again we had to cross one ridge and climb another, but the longer route took us two and one-half hours versus the three and one-half hours it took us to reach the shelter cross-country. Our legs “spoke to us” as we made our last climb up the Piney Mountain ridge, but we enjoyed the easy last two miles along the familiar ridge road to our little home on the mountain. We greatly enjoyed our walk in our woods. Chuck flushed a ruffed grouse that flashed its banded tail. Sadly the “neo-tropical migrants” that grace this mountain in summer are now in the neo-tropics, but they will return in May. Meanwhile the chickadees, creepers, nuthatches, and titmice have the mountain mostly to themselves. The thinning trees let us take in the lay of the land and its vegetation. In June it will be nearly impossible to walk through the thick woods, but they will be full of bird song. We returned at 2:30 in time to join our neighbors at a party for their granddaughter who placed first in the state high-school cross-country meet. They live near Shippensburg in the broad valley that separates South Mountain from the long ridge of Blue Mountain, or, as it is called locally, North Mountain, the first of the ridges of the “Ridge and Valley” province of Pennsylvania. Tired, we left when darkness came to return again to our little house on Piney Mountain. A good day on the mountain.
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Interesting Video
Kara submitted on January 14, 1970
This high school teacher has gotten a lot of attention for posting a video on youtube that debates whether or not it is important to confirm or deny the science of global warming when deciding if action should be taken to mitigate the effects. Watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zORv8wwiadQ
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BLOG TITLEBLOG CONTENTThis high school teacher has gotten a lot of attention for posting a video on youtube that debates whether or not it is important to confirm or deny the science of global warming when deciding if action should be taken to mitigate the effects. Watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zORv8wwiadQ
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Mark Woods Jefferson Award as reported by the Times Union 4/6/2005
Patty submitted on January 14, 1970
Compassion, service in spotlight Tonight's Jefferson Awards ceremony will honor Capital Region volunteers By AZRA HAQQIE, Staff writer First published: Wednesday, April 6, 2005 Each year the Jefferson Awards recognize volunteers for serving their communities in helping the needy and supporting education, health care, ethnic awareness and the arts. The awards are sponsored nationally by the American Institute for Public Service, based in Wilmington, Del., and locally by St. Peter's Health Care Services, WNYT Ch. 13 and the Times Union.
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BLOG TITLEBLOG CONTENTCompassion, service in spotlight Tonight's Jefferson Awards ceremony will honor Capital Region volunteers By AZRA HAQQIE, Staff writer First published: Wednesday, April 6, 2005 Each year the Jefferson Awards recognize volunteers for serving their communities in helping the needy and supporting education, health care, ethnic awareness and the arts. The awards are sponsored nationally by the American Institute for Public Service, based in Wilmington, Del., and locally by St. Peter's Health Care Services, WNYT Ch. 13 and the Times Union. Below are profiles of seven of the 27 area nominees for the public service award who were selected to receive medallions. Mark Woods , Loudonville: Woods has been a volunteer for the AIDS Council of Northeastern New York since 1992. He began there by soliciting theaters to donate movie and show tickets for people with AIDS. He managed the AIDS buddy program at a time when being diagnosed with AIDS was practically a death sentence. He has served the council in a variety of capacities and has helped raise nearly $100,000 for people affected by HIV/AIDS in crisis situations. Woods is an informal "big brother" to people struggling to survive in the community, a longtime volunteer Employee Assistance Program Coordinator at the state Department of Transportation where he helps fellow workers find community resources to support them in times of need. His gentle nature, trustworthiness and compassion have earned him a place in the hearts of many people.
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Architectural Collage, Part 3
MarkD submitted on January 14, 1970
This Blog was copied from a blog by Geof Huth of Schenectady, New York. The original is posted here
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BLOG TITLEBLOG CONTENT<html><head></head><body>This Blog was copied from a blog by Geof Huth of Schenectady, New York. The original is posted <a href="http://www.dbqp.blogspot.com/">here</a> I asked Robert Woods to stand in front of a row of his collages so I could capture the man with his work and in his work. He stood inside the house he had torn apart and rebuilt, changing an ancient structure into a modern wonder of clean lines and limpid cul-de-sacs of light. <img height="113" width="150" alt="" src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dsvnnf8gj/image/upload/v1776543747/1716727877_fc899f43dd.img_assist_custom.jpg" title="1716727877_fc899f43dd.jpg" style="float: left; margin: 0px 10px;">He stood beside the collages he made in a brief time in 1993, when he was in Europe, and these pieces reverberated with the aura of his field of endeavor at work and life, architecture. The collages are simple studies of shape: how the simplest repetitions of shapes can have meaning, how these shapes might suggest organic forms or architectonic ones, how the real world (the world of shapes) can be overcome by the human world (the world of text), how technique and materials change meaning. My interest in Robert’s work started a few weeks ago, on the 29th of September, when I met him at a party at his house, took a tour of the place, learned something about his interest in livable and beautiful design, and spent about an hour talking to him. <img height="45" width="150" alt="" src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dsvnnf8gj/image/upload/v1776543767/1717601940_1bcbcd4cbc.img_assist_custom.jpg" title="1717601940_1bcbcd4cbc.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0px 10px;">The house itself began the conversation, but his collages, which grace almost every wall in his house, captivated me, starting with this set of four collages laid out across the living room wall. The collages were simply arrangements of bits of German-language newspaper, yet they held sway over my attention. The tension always in such pieces is that between the ostensible visual aspect of the pieces and its almost latent verbal component. The words in such pieces are not meant to be read, they are merely decorative, but their existence suggests an additional layer of meaning. <img height="113" width="150" alt="" src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dsvnnf8gj/image/upload/v1776543757/1717575206_7b81e97f20.img_assist_custom.jpg" title="1717575206_7b81e97f20.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0px 10px;">The text in these serves as a stratum of meaning, one that people can uncover even if they cannot decipher them. Robert’s sense of design even extends beyond, yet through the collages. In this shot, with the flash of my camera obscuring the image, a collage resembling a gazelle’s head is paired with a horned mask. In this way, the two pieces are one; they inhabit the same space, and one is a shadow of the other. Connections abound. The world doesn’t exist as a set of discrete objects but as an intertwingled whole.* To keep track of Robert’s collages, I have assigned each a letter based on the order in which I shot its picture. The “titles” I have assigned these collages are meaningless, since the collages exist without titles. <img height="204" width="150" alt="" src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dsvnnf8gj/image/upload/v1776543760/1717588946_21b4e3a403.img_assist_custom.jpg" title="1717588946_21b4e3a403.jpg" style="float: left; margin: 0px 10px;">Their titlelessness allows them to exist in visual space, nameless, amorphous to the lettered mind. Unfortunately, the images I have captured of these photographs, using nothing but the ambient light in the room, are inadequate reproductions of the originals, allowing almost nothing of the careful beauty and grace of these pieces to shimmer through. This simple out-of-focus collage suggests a building (walls, a central courtyard) or a beast (long legs, tiny crabbed claws), so we don’t know what to make of it. Certainly, it is abstract, but just as certainly it is coming from a mind that creates concrete reality out of abstract shapes. Any building we live in is made out of shapes uncommon in nature (rectangles, squares, the occasional semi-circle), whereas nature is a congeries of indistinct shapes, rampant with possibility. Any human habitation itself is an abstract form in nature. At the top of Robert’s staircase, on the second floor of his house, a climber is greeted with a single bold collage between two illuminating sconces. <img height="201" width="150" alt="" src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dsvnnf8gj/image/upload/v1776543754/1716758909_79cd0bbd07.img_assist_custom.jpg" title="1716758909_79cd0bbd07.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0px 10px;">The background of this collage is different from that of the first-floor collages. It is dark, created out of Scherrenschnitt (“scissorcut”) paper, the paper used to cut silhouettes. When you look at the collage in person, you can see how the Scherrenshnitt is arranged in patterns on the page. Here, you can see that the Scherrenschnitt is laid over sections of the collage in four parallel and horizontal lines, making it appear that the paper beneath it has been cut away. This allows for a fairly dramatic set of shapes, suggesting a dock system, or maybe a huge sailboat moving out onto the water—depending on whether you allow the positive or negative space in the collage take precedence. If we descend the stairs and return to the first floor, we find a small room just the right size for a few collages. The doorway frames the collages, and the collages draw us in. <img height="113" width="150" alt="" src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dsvnnf8gj/image/upload/v1776543739/1716712593_48f9ef7da7.img_assist_custom.jpg" title="1716712593_48f9ef7da7.jpg" style="float: left; margin: 0px 10px;">These collages form a set that is one of the three (I believe) distinct sets of these collages. These are built upon a light background, and they each resemble the incomplete outlines of ruins dug out of the sand. Each has a courtyard surrounded by fragments of walls, some laid in place at angles, most straight. If you look closely at one of these collages, you can see that these inchoate structures are made out of layers of newspaper, not just a single layer. They encompass their own stratigraphy. Layer upon layer was added to the original sheet of these collages: paint, newspaper, newspaper, Scherrenschnitt, and a final glaze that freezes it all in place. We understand these pieces as two-dimensional pieces that represent three-dimensional space. Considering this set of collages, I recall something that Robert said to me: “Ruins, in a way, remind me of labyrinths.” As a building decays and is reduced to its foundation—which is itself then interrupted by the course of time—it becomes harder to limn. Its sturdy continuities of wall become fragments as spaces open up, and the resulting structure is indeed something like a labyrinth, which is itself a space for contemplation. One might contemplate the shape and design of the place, or one might contemplate how to extract oneself from that spac<img height="195" width="150" alt="" src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dsvnnf8gj/image/upload/v1776543763/1717595382_c1fbdf6e31.img_assist_custom.jpg" title="1717595382_c1fbdf6e31.jpg" style="float: left; margin: 0px 10px;">e. The world is all about collage. We take one idea from our childhood and a thought from yesterday and turn them into a new way of thinking about the world. We are constantly reusing bits of information we use, repurposing it to do different duty. In thinking about collage today and about how to apply the concept of collaging to architecture, Nancy remembered the board game Cathedral, which we used to play often. In Cathedral, two opposing players must set their game pieces in a confined space, a square that can hold all of the game pieces perfectly at once, if they are arranged in the right order. But the players compete to close off sections of the space from their opponents, thus leaving the opponent with leftover game pieces at the end of the game. The person who places the highest value of game pieces on the board wins the game. Nancy wrote me a note about her thoughts today, which began with collage, moved to Cathedral and architecture, and ended up discussing the remodeling of a home, which is how we began this three-day discussion of Robert’s work: I was thinking about Cathedral and how urban architects really have to use the space allowed to its fullest . . . I find that so appealing, the idea of using (or trying to use) the natural constraints to your advantage. Working within limitations. Layers of existence that are uncovered or covered to be uncovered again. <img height="209" width="150" alt="" src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dsvnnf8gj/image/upload/v1776543750/1716731949_099379ca0d.img_assist_custom.jpg" title="1716731949_099379ca0d.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0px 10px;">It’s why I love our remodel [of our home], and why I think I would find a new construction vaguely unsatisfying. It’s also probably why I prefer to edit rather than start from scratch. I’ve been thinking about Robert’s way: his careful attention to detail, to beauty, to a clean uncluttered style. And I’ve been thinking about the life he’s lived as an architect and a thinker, as a traveler and someone who’s lived for years in Europe. So I wondered why he is in Schenectady—as I often wonder why I am, after having lived in nine countries on four continents. The reason he gives is that his family is from here—including his eight siblings.<img height="113" width="150" alt="" src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dsvnnf8gj/image/upload/v1776543743/1716722535_3458790938.img_assist_custom.jpg" title="1716722535_3458790938.jpg" style="float: left; margin: 0px 10px;"> All five of my siblings live around Davidson County, Tennessee, yet that fact had no effect on where I lived, so I wondered if there might be something else keeping Robert here, in this small post-industrial city in the graying Northeast. And I wondered if he stayed here, in his hometown, because that is what buildings do. They persist in place. They endure where they were built. Maybe he had to stay here because he is his own architectural feat and that marvel must stay where it was built. _____ * Apparently, I am obsessed by the concept of intertwingularity. Below the Bar</body></html>
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Architectural Collage, Part 2
MarkD submitted on January 14, 1970
This Blog was copied from a blog by Geof Huth of Schenectady, New York. The original is posted here
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BLOG TITLEBLOG CONTENT<html><head></head><body>This Blog was copied from a blog by Geof Huth of Schenectady, New York. The original is posted <a href="http://www.dbqp.blogspot.com/">here</a> I’m slowly considering the work of Robert Woods, slowly constructing the building that will hold my thoughts about his work. I’m moving towards a discussion of the verbo-visual collages that grace the walls of his current home. Those collages formed the impetus for these words, but I’ve decided it best to move towards them slowly now, not all at once. A building does not go up in a day, after all. Apparently, it takes three. When I visited Robert last night, he lent me three of his sketchbooks, those three that I determined had the images I’d be most interested in looking at and writing about. I thought this a generous and foolhardy offer from a man who had met me but once before. It turned out that he trusted me because I’m an archivist, so I would be sure to take care of valuable records. <img height="233" width="150" alt="" src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dsvnnf8gj/image/upload/v1776543701/2007.10.21WoodsWenigerKontrolle.img_assist_custom.jpg" title="2007.10.21WoodsWenigerKontrolle.JPG" style="float: right; margin: 0px 10px;">These sketchbooks primarily document Robert’s time living and traveling in Europe. In 1978, he began his European travels by going to Switzerland as a student, followed by living there as an assistant professor of architecture, and continuing as a traveler, someone moving over the face of the earth to see what exactly it is and how parts of it differ from others. I’ll consider a few pages from these sketchbooks in chronological order: Oktober 91 – May 92 I love how the headline about kontrol and kreativity in this piece is pasted right over Robert’s notes about same. This act of gluing over and obscuring his original text goes hand in hand with the text itself, which is fighting out an argument about whether freedom or control leads to creativity. Robert’s notes are balanced and sensible, calling for both liberty of expression and a level of control: Defining basic rules, limits the freedom to plan and experiment, but guarantees a satisfactory result. The framework has to be flexible. The notes that make up “Anti-Aesthetic” record the salient points of a book Robert was reading on post-modernist thought and esthetics. Though it is difficult to appreciate this feature in a reproduction, this is a micrographic text, very neat in a loose way, but exceedingly small. <img height="220" width="150" alt="" src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dsvnnf8gj/image/upload/v1776543665/2007.10.21WoodsAntiAesthetic.img_assist_custom.jpg" title="2007.10.21WoodsAntiAesthetic.JPG" style="float: left; margin: 0px 10px;">There is something ineffably right about layering strips of tiny handwriting across a page like this, in a form that approximates the shape of some ancient pattern poem, in order to lay out fragmented notes about esthetics. Occasionally, this book erupts into collage. This collage of museum tickets, newspaper cuttings, and maps recreates his travels, boils them down into a mishmash that is exactly right. Travel is about collecting experiences at too quick a rate, about living in the moment because there are so few of them to live, about sucking in a place before it disappears from you, maybe forever. This piece, which intentionally bisects longitudinally a little white-on-black headline about Berlin, is about that fragmented experience and how we remember in fragments and wholes: Sometimes, a memory is whole (as are most of the tickets), and sometimes it is just a tiny shard of itself (like the bits of map and gift bag that peek out from beneath the tickets). The muted but attractive colors, enhanced by aging, similarly suggest the dimming of memory. <img height="232" width="150" alt="" src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dsvnnf8gj/image/upload/v1776543696/2007.10.21WoodsTicketCollage.img_assist_custom.jpg" title="2007.10.21WoodsTicketCollage.JPG" style="float: right; margin: 0px 10px;">Yesterday, Robert told me that his teacher Bernard Hoesli promulgated the ideas of his own colleague (and sometime co-writer) Colin Rowe in the book Collage City. I expect that I’m mangling the information here (in true journalistic practice), but let me make the best of it. Rowe argued (along with his co-writer, Fred Koetter) that architects can understand urban space by playing with collages, that cities are built piece by piece (and that these function like scraps of paper on a collage), that the structure of a city can be overcome by the chaos of certain bits of its collage, and that, essentially, every city and every plan for a city is a collage: pieces can be added or removed, moved or left in place, and that that understanding of the flexibility of space and how collage affords the architect a chance to make a new environment were important considerations to those recreating or adding to cities. So that leaves us with a number of architectural collages in this sketchbook of Robert’s. Most function in gridspace, to some degree, overlaying strips of text atop architectural forms. A few resemble Mondirans. Their undercarriages are watercolored sketches and their superstructures are strips of texts that seem to wash over the spaces. <img height="160" width="150" alt="" src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dsvnnf8gj/image/upload/v1776543670/2007.10.21WoodsArchitecturalCollage.img_assist_custom.jpg" title="2007.10.21WoodsArchitecturalCollage.JPG" style="float: left; margin: 0px 10px;">They play with space, with perspective, and they allow the mind to understand the space, but forcing the fingers to do some thinking. 10.1992 – 4.1993 For personal reasons, I was overjoyed to see that Robert had visited Oporto, Portugal, and sketched bits of the city, including the market I used to visit with my mother when I was a child. Oporto represents in my mind my entire childhood; to me, it was a magical place, the place where I learned to read and write (though not yet English), the place where I learned two languages, and the place where I changed from being a fairly rambunctious kindergartener into the shy student I was for the rest of my school career. Robert, unfortunately, seemed not to have sketched the bridge that haunted my childhood and which I’ve written about before. His wonderful sketch of a building that includes a plan that places it in it geographic space in the world, however, still remains a perfect travel sketch, something that captures this space beautifully, accurately, and imaginatively. <img height="212" width="150" alt="" src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dsvnnf8gj/image/upload/v1776543685/2007.10.21WoodsOportoMap.img_assist_custom.jpg" title="2007.10.21WoodsOportoMap.JPG" style="float: right; margin: 0px 10px;">And Robert’s partial map of the city of Oporto, with its microscopic details feathering out into nothingness make me scan this incomplete world for Foz do Douro, the dark street of my memory where my muddy Polaroid childhood was played out in greys and whites. Robert’s world here is an architect’s—clean, pretty, neat, and seen from above—so it hardly resembles my life on the ground, but it will do. Another perfect travel sketch is this collaged sketch of San Sebastian, Spain, with its Euskara-language* bar names. It provides little information, yet it suggests an eye at work and a memory at play. Sketchbook: Collected Travel Scraps, August 2004 In some of his later books, Robert creates interesting aleatoric collages by gluing a strip of paper to a page and then ripping off the paper, leaving behind part of the top side of the paper and spectral hints of the contents of the half-unburied back sides of the paper, with their mirror-reversed texts. <img height="229" width="150" alt="" src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dsvnnf8gj/image/upload/v1776543675/2007.10.21WoodsBarTxepetxa.img_assist_custom.jpg" title="2007.10.21WoodsBarTxepetxa.JPG" style="float: left; margin: 0px 10px;">These are little dream collages, especially this one, where an almost almond of a man’s faces peers out of a tight space, while behind him bits of text give us a message we cannot make out the significance of. Freedom and control allow us everything. With these two tools alone, we create everything—all art, all ideas, all arguments, all meals. And Robert shows how they work together. His way is mostly controlled process, but always via a liberated search for an esthetic answer. Tomorrow, the collages that began this trek for me. _____ * Okay, I could’ve used “Basque” instead, but where’s the fun in that? ecr. l’inf.<img height="235" width="150" alt="" src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dsvnnf8gj/image/upload/v1776543691/2007.10.21WoodsTearAwayCollage.img_assist_custom.jpg" title="2007.10.21WoodsTearAwayCollage.JPG" style="float: right; margin: 0px 10px;"></body></html>
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Architectural Collage, Part 1
MarkD submitted on January 14, 1970
This Blog was copied from a blog by Geof Huth of Schenectady, New York. The original is posted here A few weeks ago, Nancy and I spent time down by the Mohawk River in the oldest part of this city, the Stockade, that section of the city once surrounded by a stockade fence to protect the settlers from the outside world. We were helping out at the annual Stockade Walkabout, a fundraiser for the neighborhood association. Afterwards, we attended a couple of parties for people involved in the Walkabout, including one at the home of Robert Woods, who was finishing up the remodel of his old house in this oldest...
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BLOG TITLEBLOG CONTENT<html><head></head><body>This Blog was copied from a blog by Geof Huth of Schenectady, New York. The original is posted <a href="http://www.dbqp.blogspot.com/">here</a> A few weeks ago, Nancy and I spent time down by the Mohawk River in the oldest part of this city, the Stockade, that section of the city once surrounded by a stockade fence to protect the settlers from the outside world. We were helping out at the annual Stockade Walkabout, a fundraiser for the neighborhood association. Afterwards, we attended a couple of parties for people involved in the Walkabout, including one at the home of Robert Woods, who was finishing up the remodel of his old house in this oldest section of Schenectady. <img height="200" width="150" alt="" src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dsvnnf8gj/image/upload/v1776543660/2007.10.21_Robert_Woods_Home.img_assist_custom.jpg" title="2007.10.21+Robert+Woods'+Home.JPG" style="float: left; margin: 0px 10px;">Almost the second we entered the house, I noticed that the walls, upstairs and down, were decorated with framed verbo-visual collages of striking constructivist design. That night, I asked Robert if I could talk to him about these in more detail and write about them in this space. And that I will do. But I’ve decided that I need to break this story into pieces, so I’ll begin with the story of Robert’s house, which is all part of the same narrative, the same tendency. Robert is an architect who has spent much time in Europe studying buildings, learning design, thinking about esthetics. He currently works as an architect for the Department of Health, where he reviews designs for hospitals. I assume that that work is primarily focused on functionality, practicality, rationality. What also interests Robert, beyond these necessary issues, is beauty. He worries that too many people worry too hard about size, cherishing largeness over design, measuring their worth in square footage rather than beauty. When Robert bought this house of his, it was rundown and in need of repair, so he gutted the building and started afresh, reimagining the space. <img height="113" width="150" alt="" src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dsvnnf8gj/image/upload/v1776543636/2007.10.21_Cherry_Staircase_Robert_Woods_Home.img_assist_custom.jpg" title="2007.10.21+Cherry+Staircase,+Robert+Woods'+Home.JPG" style="float: right; margin: 0px 10px;">This is the third house he’s done this for. He recreates a house, and then he moves to a new house to do it all over again. It seems to me a true art: taking something that has worn itself almost away and bringing it back as something more than it was before. The central beauty that Robert has included in this house is a cherry staircase that climbs to a landing, turns, and climbs again. The cherry newel posts have a geometric feel to them: their heads are round, but the posts themselves are cut into diamond shapes. And these diamond shapes echo the diamonds created by the flat stair rails at the top and bottom of the stairs. <img height="200" width="150" alt="" src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dsvnnf8gj/image/upload/v1776543641/2007.10.21_Cherry_Staircase_Top_Floor_Robert_Woods_Home.img_assist_custom.jpg" title="2007.10.21+Cherry+Staircase+Top+Floor,+Robert+Woods'+Home.JPG" style="float: left; margin: 0px 10px;">This simple repeated shape ties the floors together, and the staircase itself tells us that care has been taken with this house. (Remember the staircase and the shapes. Eventually, we’ll see how they remind us of the shapes in his collages.) I’m a cook. I like to slice food apart, apply heat to it over time, and rub herbs between my hands before allowing their pieces to tumble into a pot. I like the smells of food cooking. I enjoy how my years of practice have taught me to understand foods, to know when to turn off the heat, to know how to disassemble certain foods well. I like the feel of a knife running clean through a stalk of celery or a lamb chop. The kitchen is my home. This makes a kitchen important to me as a room. I like a kitchen to be utilitarian but beautiful, and certainly my kitchen is the most beautiful room in my house, suffused with wood and graced with long counters. Robert’s kitchen is beautifully utilitarian. <img height="113" width="150" alt="" src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dsvnnf8gj/image/upload/v1776543646/2007.10.21_Kitchen_2_Robert_Woods_Home.img_assist_custom.jpg" title="2007.10.21+Kitchen+2,+Robert+Woods'+Home.JPG" style="float: right; margin: 0px 10px;">It is an open space that surrounds the cook with work space. It is compact, allowing the cook to move from place to place efficiently. And it is bright but filled with the color of wood and stainless steel. It is a graceful collage of shape and color. Just as Robert’s house is a place for art, his own and that of Corbusier, Klee,* and others. As soon as you enter the house there is a small alcove-like coat room to the left (along with a restroom). The entryway frames the framed collages of Robert’s that he has arranged on the wall. This space did not exist before Robert; he decided this demising was necessary to make the space more useful but also beautiful. <img height="113" width="150" alt="" src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dsvnnf8gj/image/upload/v1776543650/2007.10.21_Kitchen_3_Robert_Woods_Home.img_assist_custom.jpg" title="2007.10.21+Kitchen+3,+Robert+Woods'+Home.JPG" style="float: left; margin: 0px 10px;">Note that the doorway is an arch, which replicates the existing archway into the front sitting room. But rather than simply an arch, this is an archway that surrounds a door frame to a door that doesn’t exist, thus this entryway incorporates the past in the form of the existing archway and the present in the form of the door almost like all the other doors in the house. This is two entryways: one that moves us into a new room, and one that moves us into a new space of art and contemplation. Finally, look at Robert’s floors. I saw them and wondered if they were pine, so I mentioned to Robert that they looked like pine, which is what he then said they were. <img height="113" width="150" alt="" src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dsvnnf8gj/image/upload/v1776543656/2007.10.21_Pine_Floor_Robert_Woods_Home.img_assist_custom.jpg" title="2007.10.21+Pine+Floor,+Robert+Woods'+Home.JPG" style="float: right; margin: 0px 10px;">Pine, I thought, is too soft a wood to be used as flooring. Everything I have made of pine has been horribly distressed by the natural misuse I put things through. Robert said pine was not that hard a wood, but that he’s gentle on floors. A careful man who lives in the world lightly, Robert creates delicate textures of light and shadow, color and shape. And he creates verbo-visual collages that are remarkably architectural in feel. More about those collages tomorrow. They will show how a life is always of a piece, how an architect is always an architect, how our past follows us like a wedding train, how our future is just another version of that past—something Robert will prove soon. Next weekend, he moves to a new rundown house in the Stockade. My friends who have been in it say it needs enormous amounts of work. So Robert will live in some small corner of a room while he disassembles the fourth house that he will eventually turn into another beautiful piece of functional art. _____ * Keep in mind that the favorite artist of visual poets is Paul Klee. (Well, at least he should be.) ecr. l’inf.</body></html>
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Article regarding Mark W work 2005
Patty submitted on January 14, 1970
Here is an article I've saved regarding Mark
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BLOG TITLEBLOG CONTENTHere is an article I've saved regarding Mark
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Christian joke about politicians
Tom submitted on January 14, 1970
Value Voters Humor [Byron York]
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BLOG TITLEBLOG CONTENTValue Voters Humor [Byron York] Family Research Council head Tony Perkins started off the Value Voters Summit in Washington this morning with joke that served as an indication of social conservatives' unhappiness with both parties. A Republican and a Democrat are talking. The Republican says to the Democrat, "I bet you can't even say the Lord's Prayer." "Sure, I can," the Democrat answers. "Here's $20 says you can't," the Republican responds. "You're on," says the Democrat, who begins reciting, "Now I lay me down to sleep…" At that point, the audience in the Washington Hilton started to laugh. And then Perkins delivered the punch line: The Republican hands over the $20 and says, "Man, I didn't think you could do it." 10/19 09:58 AM
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Gerald Baker from the Times of London on Anti-Americanism
Tom submitted on January 14, 1970
From The Times October 19, 2007 The US is a great place to be anti-American Gerard Baker Anti-Americanism is on the wane at last. All over the world, Americans are being fêted once again as farsighted, liberating heroes.
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BLOG TITLEBLOG CONTENTFrom The Times October 19, 2007 The US is a great place to be anti-American Gerard Baker Anti-Americanism is on the wane at last. All over the world, Americans are being fêted once again as farsighted, liberating heroes. Al Gore has won a Nobel Peace Prize, an Oscar and an Emmy, the triple crown of recognition from the self-adoring keepers of bien-pensant, elite liberal, global orthodoxy. Michael Moore is treated like a prophet in Cannes and Venice, as he peddles his tales of an America that poisons its poor, sends its blacks off to war and shoots itself. Whenever a loquacious Dixie Chick or a contumacious Sean Penn utters some excoriating remark about the depravity of his or her own country, audiences around the world nod their heads in sympathetic agreement. Bill Clinton, of course, is a god. Though protocol dictates that he may not say things that are too unkind about the country he once led, a nod and a wink will suffice. It has always amused me that the same people who denounce America as a seething cesspit of blind obscurantist bigotry can’t see the irony that America itself produces its own best critics. When there’s a scab to be picked on the American body politic, no one does it with more loving attention, more rigorous focus on the detail, than Americans themselves. It has always been this way. The fiercest and most effective opponents of US foreign policy in the 1960s were not the students in Paris or the Politburo in North Vietnam. They were Jane Fonda, Bobby Kennedy and Marvin Gaye. Today I can only laugh when I see the popular portrayal of George Bush’s America in much of the international media. Supposedly serious commentators will say, without evident irony, that free speech is under attack, that Bush’s wiretapping, Guantanamo-building, tourist-fingerprinting regime is terrifying Americans into quiet, desperate acquiescence in the country’s proliferating crimes. The truth is that America not only harbours the most eloquent and noisy anti-Americans in its own breast, it provides a safe haven for people to come from all over the world to condemn it. Take a stroll through almost any American university campus and you will hear a cacophony of voices in a hundred different languages, slamming everything America does, from fast food to hedge-fund capitalism. For years one of America’s most celebrated academics was Edward Said, the Palestinian agitator-cum-professor, who lived high on the hog at Columbia University, near the pinnacle of the American intellectual establishment, dispensing his wisdom about US wrongs in the Middle East. Hollywood is the global mecca for angry denouncers of everything American. From all over they come, forcing themselves to live in their green-lawned mansions carefully tended by cheap migrant labour from south of the Border. This autumn, unsuspecting Americans (and everyone else, of course) will be treated to an especially unsettling stream of antiwar, anti-American propaganda, much of it produced in Hollywood by foreigners – such as this weekend’s likely box-office hit, Rendition. And where would the world get its daily media diet of horror stories about what a ghastly country the place is if its reporters weren’t all comfortably pavilioned inside America, where they make a generous living happily devouring the hand that generously feeds them? It’s true that self-criticism is always more effective than an outsider’s observations. Let’s be honest, how much real moral weight do Vladimir Putin or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad carry when they decry American motives and actions? All but the most unhinged of America’s critics know, deep down, in a part of the brain they try not to consult, that whatever they may think of the Bushitler in Washington, they don’t feel comfortable agreeing with the ex-KGB hatchet man of the Kremlin or the Holocaust-denying Dr Strangelove sitting astride his Islamist bomb. It sounds so much better when Al Gore or Michael Moore says it. But ask yourself why that is. Isn’t it because they know that only American criticism really carries legitimacy? Only a country that enthusiastically and self-woundingly honours Voltaire’s old dictum about free speech can really be trusted to cast judgment on anything. There’s another, more important aspect to the world’s affection for those in America who are most critical of it. The Americans who win global approbation in Oslo or at the UN are not simply critics of current American policy. They want to construct an international system that will for ever prevent the US from pursuing its own objectives, a system designed to dilute, counterbalance and constrain America’s ability to govern itself. They prefer a world in which American democracy is subordinated to a kind of global government, rule by a global elite, tasked to make decisions on everyone’s behalf in the name of multilateralism. Al Gore wants the US to give up its economic autonomy and submit to rule by binding international obligations to curb its carbon emissions. Some of the Democratic candidates for the presidency want to tie down the American Gulliver under a web of global treaties. The British Government, if recent speeches by ministers are to be believed, is now apparently seriously committed to the idea that only the UN has the legitimacy to determine how nations should behave. In other words, that a system that gives vetoes to China and Russia and honours the human rights contributions of countries such as Syria or North Korea should be accorded a full role in the promotion of the dignity of mankind. There’s a larger irony in all this. Even as the US demonstrates the openness of its own society, its unrivalled capacity for self-examination and self-correction, a free system based on the absolute authority of the rule of law, it is told it must submit itself to the views of Moscow, Beijing, and Brussels. Fortunately, while the American system may be forgivingly tolerant of people with wild and dangerous ideas, it doesn’t generally let them run the country. Comment--"Yanks go Home and Take me with You" Bill Mac, Falkirk, UK
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Chopped Liver Alert
Patty submitted on January 14, 1970
I am collecting any references to "chopped liver" that I encounter. Here's the latest: Spartan Foray [Mark Krikorian] I'll be speaking this evening at Michigan State, sponsored by the local YAF chapter; see details here. The Young Democratic Socialists chapter on campus held a press conference Tuesday denouncing YAF (see here; the red Che Guevara t-shirt was an especially nice touch), but they don't seem to have attacked me specifically — what am I, chopped liver? I only hope I can get as enthusiastic a response as Tom Tancredo or Chris Simcox. 10/04 06:25 AM
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BLOG TITLEBLOG CONTENTI am collecting any references to "chopped liver" that I encounter. Here's the latest: Spartan Foray [Mark Krikorian] I'll be speaking this evening at Michigan State, sponsored by the local YAF chapter; see details here. The Young Democratic Socialists chapter on campus held a press conference Tuesday denouncing YAF (see here; the red Che Guevara t-shirt was an especially nice touch), but they don't seem to have attacked me specifically — what am I, chopped liver? I only hope I can get as enthusiastic a response as Tom Tancredo or Chris Simcox. 10/04 06:25 AM
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