Wac6arts

Walking the Williamsburg Bridge

You can't traverse a long suspension bridge with out (a) wondering how it works and (b) sizing it up aesthetically.   

It's not anything like walking the Brooklyn Bridge, but in walking west across the Williamsburg Bridge yesterday, I found more "inner workings" intrigue and lessons in structured perspective than I could have expected.  

Notice the guys in hard hats down alongside the far train track. They remained there as trains went by. They don't have much room for error!

Also interesting were groups of Hasidic mothers and Hasidic families crossing the bridge pushing babies in strollers.

Here's a video of two trains crossing:

An Art & Design Blog Worthy of the iPad

My friend and client David Meunier sent me this link last week to an art & design blog curated by a person who has a voracious eye and great taste.

The blog is called "today and tomorrow" and the blogger identifies himself as Pieter, a Belgian living in Germany.

The typical post consists mostly of images, credited to other sources, with a few brief comments for background or context. Pieter has laid things out so that they look great on an iPad! Makes me think the iPad could become the format for design magazines.

Exception: the flash videos he's embedded show up as just blank white space on the iPad.

Here's an image from a post on poster stencils by Sten & Lex:

On the iPad, this and other images "wave" as you scroll up and down the screen, almost as though the image might break out into a lenticular (won't that be fun, to develop a digital lenticular).

Jay Z - The New Sinatra

This is a guest post by my brother, Mark Carleton. Mark, my brother Tim, my nephews Steve and Wade, Steve's girlfriend, and I, all went to this show to celebrate Mark's birthday. Mark is graciously providing these photos under a Creative Commons non-commercial use, attribution license (credit: Mark Carleton). Please link to this blog when using these photos under such license.

Jay-Z played to a sold out house at the Pepsi Center last night in Denver. It was my first Jay-Z concert. I was expecting it to be good and he didn't disappoint.

It was an impressive show. The music and performance were solid.

The lighting and the graphics projected on the stage backdrop added to the show and made it fun to watch.

Jay-Z is a great entertainer and showman. He lives up to the accolades as "the new Sinatra."

Light Rail to SeaTac Airport

The light rail ingress and egress for SeaTac airport does not feature any architectural marvel, but it functions like a dream. Frankly, it's a relief the infrastructure is not overbuilt or gussied up with with vaulting this, that or the other.

Walking from the train platform, you take a bridge to what looks like the parking garage, a strip of which has been repurposed as a corridor to the main terminal. Works great. Feels the right sort of permanent for the 21st Century. No glamour, no nonsense. Love it.

Tweet Me Harder @ Arcane Comics

The Tweet Me Harder duo webcast live from Arcane Comics in West Seattle last night.

I was the oldest person there, by a long decade, though I didn't feel resented or unwanted. No one actually talked to me unless I initiated conversation, but, then again, no one talked to anyone else who came by himself or herself. And yet everyone smiled, made way when someone needed to get through, said "excuse me" when tripping over you.

I had a fine time. I found a spot near an outlet that I could plug my iPhone in, permitting me to run the #tmh tweetstream on battery-sucking 3G during the whole show. 

The show, the crowd, were . . . wholesome.

If anyone was selling anything or sponsoring anything, I missed it. By contrast, public events for tech geeks are practically Times Square with all the bling and booths and banner ads. This event could have been held in a public library and been more commercial.

Milling about after the show, I tried to pick up an Iron Man comic book but that's just not happening for me anymore. I came home and read On the Brink by Henry Paulson (a kind of grown up comic book) instead.

And here's an interesting fact for you: the younger, geekier generation may tweet with ferocious attitude, but it does NOT swear.

Half a dozen of us hovered over the pizza boxes at the end of the show (there was free cheese pizza, ham wraps, veggies and dip, cookies and soda), no one wanting to take the first slice. Finally I asked the gal who was putting the stuff out and she said it was okay and I took the first piece. I pocketed a coke to take home which was probably really uncool especially since the sodas ran out, but that is the kind of thing I learned to do in the artsy crowd I hung with when I was in my 20s.

Lord knows I tried to get someone to go with me. Tried to get my youngest son, but he had cooler plans. Tried to entice of my favorite clients, but he had a date. Tried to persuade one of my partners at the firm that he needed to scout fresh material for his podcast list, but he's too busy doing deals to spend a Friday night away from his family. I'll bet my brother Tim would have gone with me.

Alexander Calder Show @ the Seattle Art Museum

You learn how incorrigibly playful Alexander Calder must have been from the 1961 film by Carlos Vilardebó, Le Cirque de Calder, now playing in a video loop at the Seattle Art Musuem as part of its exhibit of the Jon and Mary Shirley collection of Calder's work. The film is of a puppet circus that Calder performed for friends throughout his life. Calder's skills with wire and handmade contraptions are on display, as Calder makes the puppet performers and animals move and perform circus tricks. "Madame, Monsier," he calls out, in the voice of the puppet ringleader, when a new act steps up. Some of the wire-frame-and-cloth circus animals even leave behind poops, which Calder covers with sawdust and sweeps away before bringing in the next act.

Calder was born at the end of the 19th Century and he died over 30 years ago. Some of the work on exhibit is over 70 years old. And yet, the only thing in the show that seems dated is the film (and that is because of the film quality and tell-tale tinniness of the soundtrack, not the play it captures).

The show of hanging mobiles, standing mobiles, wire sculpture and jewelry is also a playground. And more is in play than the mobiles in motion: they are lit to cast strong shadows, and placed to be physically accessible from every (terrestrial) angle. The jewelry is under glass, as it should be, but the rest of the work is not. You are asked to not touch, but the fact that you can -- or might step the wrong way and be swiped by a fin of sheet metal -- makes the show fun. Even black circles on the floor, meant to demark the radial sweep of the hanging moblies (and thus no-go zones for pedestrians), contribute to the fun: I saw a mother and child chasing each other along one of the circles. But the main reason you do not touch the objects is because they are at work; and that fact relieves you of the duty of having to regard them as sacrosanct. (Pictured in this paragraph: Bougainvillier, 1947. Photo copyright © 2010 Calder Foundation. Used in accordance with the fair use guidelines on the Calder Foundation site.)

One has to think that the Shirleys are responsible for how humanely the show is laid out. It's awfully generous of them, not only to lend their collection, but to permit it to be shown in such an accessible way.

Calder in his Roxbury studio, 1944. Photograph by Eric Schaal. Copyright © 2010 Calder Foundation. Used in accordance with the fair use guidelines on the Calder Foundation site.

Although the work is fresh, particularly in the ensemble of this show, sheet metal is no longer a particularly contemporary artistic material. The passage of time makes Calder's material seem like construction paper, albeit that of a giant craftsman. Matisse had his large colored paper to take scissors to, and he laid the pieces out in two dimensions; Calder cut from sheet metal and wired his pieces to hang and balance in space and define a different kind of volume, an accessible interior.

Cherry Trees and iPhones

The more I watch, the more I am convinced that, in our present-day society, no one is ever doing nothing. People share a space they like to call "public," but are usually distracted by their technological devices, be it a cell phone, iPhone, iPod, or game console. Don't we all crave contact with other human beings? We hide from each other, yet seek connection at the same time. -- Margeaux Walter

Saturday, March 6, 2010, yesterday, was glorious in Seattle. The sky had never been so purely blue, so deeply, for so long an early spring afternoon. It was the perfect day to see the cherry trees in blossom on the University of Washington campus, and hundreds did so.

photo by mcoughlin, used under Creative Commons license http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcoughlin/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

Almost all came in groups, as families, friends, or couples. Every group had a picture-taker; many had two or more. There were digital SLRs, point and shoot cameras, and camera phones. Much distraction by technological devices, indeed: but all focused on another, or the group, or recording the fact that a social ritual had been observed, an experience shared, or captured. It was one of those moments from a David Brooks column: we're all in the future and behold, we're acting out the communal values of our great-great-grandparents (or something like that).

In the peak of the sunshine, at the southernmost corner of the quadrangle, where the cherry trees are younger and the branches hang lower, a young woman in stylish boots, green taffeta skirt and pink sweater posed patiently while a retro-spectacled young man wearing glow-in-the-dark jeans used a slick, white point-and-shoot camera to take close up after close up of her next to a dipping bough of blossoms. Or so he tried. She was evidently not pleased with the rushes on the device's LCD, as she relieved him of the camera, resumed her pose, and took photos of herself from her own outstretched arm. (He at that point very competently shouldered her oversized, polka-dotted purse.)

 photo by Brian Dorsey (taken with an Apple iPhone 3GS), used under Creative Commons license

At the next tree over, a mother tried to help a reluctant girl climb into the "v" between the tree's two main branches. A photographer circled, looking for the least awkward moment. They were in the wrong place: plenty of kids were finding footing in the crooks of larger trees (one pictured above) on the northern half of the quad.

Hammering Man's Arm Has Come Off!

Just crossing University Street walking south on First Avenue, shocked to see that Hammering Man is not only not working, but has lost his working arm altogether! In the shop for repairs, a City of Seattle sign says.

The Dark Side of Curling

You gotta love an Olympic sport that moves as slowly as a game of chess but takes place on a super-sized bowling alley. Where the "stones" roll like solemn, celestial hockey pucks.

The dark side of curling? No, I doubt there could actually be a dark side to curling. There is something weird going on with scale, speed and time, however.

The video clip and pics here are from yesterday's Olympics bronze medal match in Vancouver, between Sweden and Switzerland.

 

The Sacramento Airport - 20th Century Charm

I like how "old school" the Sacramento airport is. Like the one in Palo Alto, the scale is right. The fact you use it to jet from state to state in a matter of hours is taken casually.

And yet, old as the structure is, everything is California current. Out on the curb, waiting for my mom to pick me up, the guy on the recording warning people to not leave their cars unattended finishes with a flourish: "believe me, the tow truck guys work fast!"

As in Palo Alto, it looks like a new terminal is being built here. I doubt it can replicate the low-key nature of the existing structure. It isn't complete, but the steel frame is already up, towering high, supporting a cascading, vaulted roof. More of what people think airports should look like these days, I guess. Does anyone think about the acoustics of such places?