Civilization was built by people like this, and there is a stunning lack of gratitude in our culture for their work.
In this specific case, at least half of the apple varieties in Brown’s collection were considered “lost” until he personally tracked them down and saved them.
He literally went on quests where he did things like, tracking a lost variety back to a stump of a long-ago-cut-down tree near an abandoned homestead in remote Appalachia, took cuttings from the green shoots coming out of the stump, brought them back and planted them.
Absolute legend.
There is a zombie 20th century culture, where you can still scroll Instagram and believe culture is run by artist-looking people making art-looking things. And there is a latent 21st century culture, where the most visibly unremarkable person alive is quietly reshaping economies from within the infrastructure. We currently have no theory for the relationship between the two.
If I had one piece of advice, it would be this:
> Make yourself a consistently pleasant person to be around
You spend most of your life alone, but every once in a while you knowingly or unknowingly come across opportunities to be absorbed into a family, community, or social structure
These opportunities are the spice of life. They can be great accelerators and transformers of your experience and potential.
The simple way to improve your entire life is to not accidentally disqualify yourself from these opportunities.
@delta_alpha_ohm no prior to the 18th century there was no autonomous category for art, it was an ideological (and arguably quite nice) move to carve reality into autonomous fields
It's hard for people to grasp that distinction may be over because it is so embedded
The secondary (maybe spicier) goal is to remind people that how companies are structured, what their business models are, and how they are funded will absolutely inform how they behave in the world, despite how they present themselves with marketing and branding.
@intothebrew Best by - but Moenchsambacher stores fairly well in my experience, but batch-to-batch variation can be noticeable. It's definitely one of the few beers whose bottles compare well with draft/gravity cask - something quite rare in Franken.
It seems likely that figuring out the principles & protocols of governance for this mediation layer will be one of the great challenges of the 21st century, a challenge much like figuring out the principles underlying, say, the US constitution.
@europebarguide@bartlebeer I love Spezial but the Ungespundet is shockingly unreliable for years already. Peerless if in condition but even at the brewery it tends to be awful half the time, ranging from subtle to insane butyric acid offender. Drinking it weekly but always making sure to pre-sample.
22. From William Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954):
"He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life, where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one’s waking life was spent watching one’s feet."
In college I heard a story about Giacometti and Picasso walking down a decrepit street in Paris. Picasso, looking up at the ramshackle buildings, asked, ''How can these buildings possibly continue to stand?''
''Force of habit,'' Giacometti replied.
I found the comment hilarious, but as I grew older and began to struggle to get my own sculptures to stand, I started to wonder, ''What does the guy know that I don't?''
Since then I've kept coming back to Giacometti's work. With each return I get a new insight, a fresh experience, but also something harder to articulate: a sense that over time Giacometti began to convince space itself to shape and model his sculptures. That's an amazing feat. You can see what I mean starting on Thursday, when the Museum of Modern Art opens an exhibition of sculptures, drawings and paintings by Alberto Giacometti (1901-66). The show will include nearly 200 works from 1919 to 1965.
I first encountered Giacometti's sculpture on the cover of a paperback anthology of existentialist writing. It seemed appropriate. Here was an elongated burnt stick of a man pointing his bony finger at what I thought could only be the establishment that had dropped the bomb. This was in high school. In college I read the anthology, and then my art history teacher told me to note the figure's large weighty feet. This guy is earthbound, alone; he's not going to fly. He must be existential man.
I was told that Sartre and Giacometti were friends. One day I picked up an interview with Giacometti in which he was asked about an existential reading of his work. He replied, no, actually he was trying to make his figures as realistic as possible. What? To me, these figures were walking out of Dresden or Hiroshima.
He went on to explain that when he looks at you he can't see all of you. He scans you, looking at your nose, then your lips, over your shoulder, then at your breast, belly and knees, all the way down the leg past your foot to the toes.
As I recall, he said something like this:
We see parts of each other and we put them together. But if I want to see you in totality, you need to move away; we need space between us. Across the street I can see all of you at once, but then I also see this huge vista of space surrounding you, coming in and compressing you.
This thought has never left me. And through it I began to see that rather than thinking about sculpture, one might be able to learn to think sculpturally.
Other interviews with Giacometti were equally confounding and enlightening. Once while looking at his ''Four Women on a Base'' I remembered reading an interview that took place in a hotel lobby. Giacometti was saying to a critic that the four beautiful women who had just entered the lobby could not be seen separately from the space the shiny marble floor generated between him and them.
I think Giacometti's sculptures somehow carry that space with them. To me, it's a kind of world space that we exist in. We can look at it in different ways. Biblically we were cast into it. Architects talk about public and private space.
Physicists connect space to time. Some scholars even see it as a construct. But when you look at Giacometti's ''Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object),'' you realize that you will never know what space is, even though, just as you can touch the rectangular slab resting on the figure's feet, you can touch it, hold it and get lost in your relationship to it.
Smaller works like ''City Square,'' ''The Cage (Woman and Head)'' and some of the various small figures and busts are fantastic for their sculptural use of scale. Mediocre sculptures all have scale. They're really big, life-size, small or miniature. Good sculptures use a psychological yardstick rather than a physical one to measure scale. Great sculptures, like some of Giacometti's, have no scale.
Rather, scale becomes one of the tools he uses to carve his work into our present space and time. When you look at a small Giacometti you never say, ''Oh! Look at the little guy. What a wonderful miniature.'' No. You say, ''This guy can sculpt!'' It's never big or small, it's always simply the right scale.
This sounds elementary, but it's not. It's one of the essential ways he imbues his work with the life and breath of our real world. These works are not images you can read or understand–they are alive, breathing, waiting for you to come and meet them. Check out ''The Palace at 4 A.M.'' Physically, this small work fits on the top of a pedestal, but later it grows and fills your mind. You can move through it and feel each and every bit of the urgency of its construction. It was made in 1932, but it feels as if it were made moments ago.
Giacometti shows us how to see from a sculptural point of view. A sculpture needs an armature the way a body needs its skeleton. Perhaps everything has an armature, thought being built around a kind of wire in the mind. Giacometti's use of armature was conventional until you understand that several bronzes were born from the clay on one twisted metal rod. After working for a day, a week or maybe a month, he would reach a point of satisfaction. Down the hall from his studio, his brother Diego worked as a furniture maker. Diego would take a plaster mold of the clay original and then use the mold to make a plaster duplicate while Giacometti returned to working on the clay original.
At a certain point, Diego would make another mold and later another and perhaps another and another. The sculpture was in flux, and the plasters became a way to see it in time. Giacometti wasn't interested in the fact that the plasters froze the form but in the way the play of light on the surface of the plaster gave him alternative positions from which to view his work. I think this process is beautiful and can serve as an entrance into the work itself. It's so physical yet ephemerally spread out in time, like a thought growing in the mind.
When Giacometti worked, he could never articulate only one section of a piece. It was the whole or nothing. If he lost control of an arm, head or some other part, he could never fix it or work from there. He had to start again, bring it up from the ground as one whole form, just as he saw the completeness of a human figure from across a vista of space.
He was once confronted with the fact that these figures across the street or on the far side of a cafe often come toward us, up to us and break down into their component parts of hands, noses, mouths and feet. Why didn't he deal with this more intimate aspect of figuration? His answer was something along these lines: ''Yes, people do come across the street to say hi, but as they approach and get near, my perception of space begins to dissolve, and a new interest takes over that is primarily emotional, and with it comes a desire to touch, which may be a human interest, but not the interest of my work.''
That's a powerful thought. Even the bust of Diego is Einsteinian, thin as a pancake when viewed from the front and squeezed out into space as you are drawn around it.
The roughness of the surface never draws you in the way a blemish on your friend's face does. Look at the form and surface of all his mature figurative sculptures. They're stretched and pulled, rough but somehow never ragged or torn. In the end, all his figures, like the buildings on that dilapidated street he walked with Picasso, seem to stand by force of habit. Somehow with Giacometti, habit and other aspects of human psychology are embedded in his work the way the gravitational field is embedded in space.
Charles Ray
October 7 2021
What I eventually discovered was that speaking my truth was insufficient, because it created situations where it made others look bad, which in turn united everyone against me.
I addressed this by updating my internal definition of “truth” to “factual and kind”.
@Scholars_Stage In English? Pulling information from other language knowledge base is still surprisingly disappointing. Not sure this is the issue here, but I tend to run multiple requests simultaneously to search/translate in the specific languages