Lissa blew out her ankle yesterday. Ouch.
I came home to find her sitting in her favorite chair with her leg up on an ottoman and ice on the ankle. She was hobbling. Today she can’t even put weight on it at all. We fear a trip to the emergency room is in order. Ouch.
Lissa and I went to the New Mexico State Fair Saturday night, which got me thinking about art and creative constraints.
In addition to cows and clydesdales and midway carnival attractions, the fair is a sort of egalitarian melting pot of our best and sometimes worst creative output as a community. My favorite spot is always the Building of Goofy Hobbies, in which coin collectors and wood carvers and kids building with Lego put their best work on display. This year there was a crossstitch of a Frank Lloyd Wright stained glass window and a bobbinlace image of a ’70s-era Corvette sitting beneath a tree. It was magnificent.
We also arrived on the right night to see the local N-scale model railroad club’s display. They do fabulous work. There was Hoover Dam, and an amusement park, a lumber mill, an oil refinery, all to scale, all in modules that plug in one to the next so the trains can circle the room through an endless succession of imagined worlds. The N scale people are wildly creative, but in a perfectly constrained way. It has to be to scale, and match some real-world environment, real or imagined. And each module has to have the same three sets of rails spaced exactly right to match the modules to the left and right.
This is part of why I cannot write fiction. I am terrified by the completely blank slate. Your character can say and do anything. It’s frightening. Ah, but journalism – the real world provides constraints, and there I can flourish. The potentially story space for me to traverse is immense, with many dimensions, but it is usefully constrained. That’s what frames are for in painting, and the strictures of the French Academy of the 19th century.
I’ve been listening to Dave Brubeck of late. Music is helpfully constrained, especially by the standard strictures of the 3 or 4 beat measure. Brubeck poked his way out of that just a bit, with pleasant result, but never strayed far from the constraint. Ditto the Allman Brothers with that riveting 3/3/3/2 introduction to Whipping Post. But again, they couldn’t keep it up for long. It’s scary out beyond the constraints.
Thanks to Lou Metzger, who was out at Moriarity two weeks ago with a camera, I’ve got a snap of me time trialing:
And this, of Jaime, Gianna and I (Gianna’s the cute one, Jaime’s the handsome one, that leaves you to figure out which one’s me….)
From the CIA:
We regret we are unable to process and provide certificates of congratulations to the fine young Americans who have become Eagle Scouts. We have curtailed some activities in order for us to concentrate on the War on Terrorism.
From the user’s manual to the Shimano Flight Deck cyclocomputer (a sort of handlebar speedometer gizmo):
WARNING: Be careful not to pay excessive attention to the computer data while riding, otherwise you might have an accident.
Lissa’s back garden has really come into its own this summer.
The panorama above (click for a bigger image) is five shots electronically stitched together so you can get a feel for the joy of it all.
The sunflowers have been a show, and the raised bed we built several years ago has an abundance of zinnias that just keep on blooming. Over on the mound on the right, a California poppy is finally taking hold, and L’s been persistent in raising some tomatoes for my breakfasts. Yumm.
The shiny thing on the left with the cattails growing out of it is our pond. Birds love it, as do we.
In which Jeff visits the fish market, reminding me that there is far more to good journalism these days than the paid tripe myself and my colleagues often dish out:
The Fish Markets are a short walk from our place, which is very handy for Sunday lunches. Everyone else seems to feel the same way, because it’s always busy. There are the rough old fishermen in beanies and flannies, snarling at the New Money fishermen, who look remarkably similar to the land-lubber Country Road set finishing off their lobster-champagne brunches; there are the European tourists valiantly trying to enjoy their meals, tortured by a fear that they could be eating their death, with their tour guide saving his commission by reassuring them that Australian seafood doesn’t kill; there are the American tourists frowning at the messy floors and lack of have-a-nice-day service; there are the Japanese university students serving sashimi, lending an authenticity to the process marred only by the speed of their knife-clumsy typing hands and shy apologies; there are the punters carrying armfuls of fresh seafood, chasing their children over the slippery carpark; the families out on the dock sitting around bright plastic tables overflowing with mussels, calamari, chips and Coke; and the forlorn B-list TV personalities watching as their crowds shift to welcome a local movie star. There’s also fish.
This is a piece I’ve wanted to do for a long time:
John Geissman bounded up the steep side of the volcanic knoll, leaving a trail of geologists panting behind him.
A tough half-mile climb above the valley floor, in a clump of oak, Geissman found what he was looking for? a piece of scientific history.
On this 1,000-foot high mound of volcanic rock in the summer of 1964, geologists found the final piece of a puzzle that changed the way we view our planet.
Geissman dropped his pack and circled a small outcrop of the rock that nearly four decades ago proved the theory of plate tectonics? that the continents move beneath our feet.
And I get paid for doing that. Remarkable privilege.
Mark your calendars. Dave Barry notes that Sept. 19 is Talk Like a Pirate Day. Avast!
I am some distance into Einstein in Berlin, an entwined parallel history of Einstein’s scientifically formative years and the city in which he spent a good portion of them. The book in concept is intriguing – tell the story of Germany’s revolution between the world wars through the lens of Einstein’s science. And tell the story of Einstein’s science through the lens of Germany’s revolution between the world wars.
It’s ambitious and intriguing conceptually and a little uneven in execution thus far, but as I don’t know enough about either subject, and because I am intrigued by the author’s attempt at a rather difficult bookish entwining, I’m sticking with it.