Liz West, An Additive Mix

Artist Liz West has created an installation called An Additive Mix in which two hundred and fifty colored lights combine to make white light. I really like this. A lot. As first seen on Beautiful Decay.

The Long-Running Poetry Series About the Summer of 2006 Continues Here Today

June 30, 2006
The last few days I’ve been enjoying

listening to specific songs
rather than just shuffling all the time
like I usually do

music I actually bought and downloaded
which makes me feel very high tech

Just in Time sung by Nina Simone
Life on Mars by David Bowie
Both Sides Now by Joanie Mitchell
La Vie en Rose as performed by Louis Armstrong
America by Simon and Garfunkle
And the entire record by the Postal Service

And about that last one I have a question
Does
I was the one worth leaving
mean
I was the one who deserved to be left
or
I was the one worthy of doing the leaving
?

It kind of works either way
though I tend to suspect it’s the former
Funny because I believe I’d think the opposite
if it were sung by a woman

A Good Read

Here is a very interesting article in Publishing Perspectives (part of a larger ongoing series) about the state of illustrated book publishing today. In it, our publisher here at Chronicle Books is quoted extensively, along with honchos from many other important publishing houses that focus on visual books. And the whole thing leads off with a gorgeous photo of one of the books I am very most proud to have edited last year: The Thing The Book. Well worth a perusal.

Paris Day 8

In the morning we visited Notre Dame, stopping to admire, and stand upon, the Kilometre Zero plaque in the ground out front, and noticing how all the angels and saints carved around the doorway in are different, and are busy having various complex relationships with one another. We then went in and oohed and ahed a good deal at the interior. In the afternoon we went for a walk on the Champs Elysees, starting at the Arc de Trimophe and wandering on down the street to people watch and window shop, stopping into the famous children's shop Petit Bateau (not pictured) to buy Mabel a new sunhat, and stopping at a sidewalk cafe for an Evian au Sirop Menthe which is apparently what the french teenagers drink when they're wandering around here and which, I can tell you, is strangely both not very food and oddly refreshing, all at the same time. Later in the evening we walked though the Marais to go to dinner at Breakfast In America--a restaurant opened by an American expat that attempts to first explain, and then serve, American breakfast to french people. Everything tasted just as it should and I found the menu hilarious.

City of Her Own Creation

It's funny to think how much things can change in just half a year or so. In February Mabel was four and in preschool, she let me cut her hair into a sort of short pixie mohawk of my own devising, and she threw lego blocks together at lightening speed to create abstract cityscapes such as this one. Now she is five and in kindergarten, she prefers to keep her hair longer in curly mop cut by a real hair-cutter, and she meticulously follows the directions that come in the lego set to build the thing pictured (she's currently working on the Mos Eisley Cantina from Star Wars). It's surely a cliche of the most worn variety to say "they grow up so fast"--but I've said it before and I'll say it again: It's a cliche because its true.

San Francisco Museums

I've been working on making a list of San Francisco museums. Ultimately I'd like it to be exhaustive. Here's what I've got so far. Let me know what I'm missing!

SFMOMA
The De Young
The Legion of Honor
The Academy of Sciences
The Exploratorium
The Asian Art Museum
The Mexican Museum
The Contemporary Jewish Museum
YBCA
MoAD
The Itlaian American Museum
The Cartoon Art Museum
The Disney Family Museum
The Children’s Creativity Museum
The Randall Museum
The Musee Mechanique
The Museum of Craft and Design
The Tenderloin Museum
The GLBT History Museum
The Wattis Institute
Hass Lilienthal House
The Cabel Car Museum
The Railway Museum
The Fire Museum
The SF Museum and Historical Society

Image is of SFMOMA's new building, pulled from their own Instagram feed, but turns out by pure coincidence to actually have been taken by my pal Peter Perez (aka @wirechairs)!

Next Up In the Ongoing Poem Series About the Summer of 2006

June 29, 2006
This morning

there was a pretty big moth
on the ladies’ room floor
Pale brown all over
with little feelers sticking off its head
Perfectly formed but perfectly still
Was it dead?
I would have thought so
or else what was it doing on the floor?
(it wasn’t all splayed out either
like they sometimes are
when they sleep or something
stuck up on walls)
but then later it was gone
Where did it go?
Did someone kick it away
or wipe it up with a wad of toilet paper?
Or did it just get up and fly off somewhere?




image source is here

Authorship Is Happening!

Well, it's official! I am writing two books. I have shaken hands with each of my two editors at Chronicle Books on deals for these babies, which I will now write and which will both come out in the Spring of 2017 (how there happened to be two happening at the same time was due to a combination of factors: one, me getting off my butt, and two, coincidence). One book will be about the intersection of art and happiness. The other one will be about being a grown-up. And I am really really really excited about both of them, and honored that I get to do this. So now, sometimes at my desk at home, and sometimes at my local cafe--aided and abetted by lattes, or beer, or cocktails as the day and hour demand--I am actually sitting down to write the words. I mentioned here before how, for the two previous books I authored, I did not write many words (but rather mostly pulled together images) but for these two new ones I will write all the words. Holy crap!

Paris Day Seven

After an incredibly picturesque breakfast we took a long early-morning-sunlit walk through the city to the Louvre. I've already shown you some of the art we enjoyed there, but here are a few glimpses of long galleries, enfilades, the crowds peeping at the Mona Lisa, and the Napoleon III historic rooms. Later, after rest time, we took an afternoon walk, across the Bassin de 'Arsenal canal to the Promenade Plantee, a raised garden path (that I believe long ago was a railway track, kind of like the High Line in New York) where you can stroll for blocks and blocks at rooftop level, enjoying the greenery and the surrounding buildings--including a crazy one with huge copies of Michelangelo's Dying Slave all over the outside of itself. Then home in time for supper, and ice cream of course.