Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer. Zim Zum, 1990. oil, crayon, shellac, ashes, sand, dust and canvas on lead 3.8 x 5.6 m. National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Yesterday after thinking about the large Gursky photographs and standing around in galleries looking at very large things I thought about Kiefer.  So I wrote the post below, and now find it has sucked all the light out of the day.  Too much Sturm und Drang for me.  I'd rather be looking at Ocean III.  However.

The first major Anselm Kiefer exhibition I saw was at the Saatchi Gallery in conjunction with several Richard Serra pieces – great slabs of steel balanced on their corners against the wall.  Someone had been injured in the installation.  Seeing the Kiefers was something like when an earlier generation first saw Mark Rothko's enormous, ambiguous colour fields at the Tate.  Kiefer's paintings cover whole gallery walls; one cannot get enough distance from them, one is completely humbled by them.

Much is written about the symbols and myths of German history and the Holocaust in Kiefer: Zim Zum, above, is from the Kabbalah and refers, roughly, to destruction and creative rearrangement.  And there appear to be many debates about whether a German can do anything with German myths and not be a closet Nazi.  Kiefer's work is both textual in that it insists on working with both Teutonic and Jewish history, and in its messy application of straw and mud, paint and dust, often to make great ploughed fields that appear to be totally barren, devoid of life, incapable of resurrection, work shouts out about the destruction of Germany.  It helps to know that Kiefer studied with Joseph Beuys. There is a sensuality that is not romantic in this work – perhaps it is the sensuality of melancholy and despair. 

I've never seen much renewal in Kiefer's work, although the symbols of such are supposedly all there in it.  This is one of the issues with text-based work and criticism: the work becomes the vehicle for another kind of project whereby the physical painting is cast as a cipher to a larger, off-canvas discourse which can change with political rapidity.  Meanwhile, one is left standing in front of a 3 x 5 m work which is unbearably, unrelentingly dark.  I think this has to be taken seriously as an end point: war destroys, and whatever replaces whatever is destroyed is never enough.  

Andreas Gursky

Andreas Gursky. Ocean V, 2010. 
Chromogenic Print 
366,4 x 249,4 x 6,4 cm. Courtesy Sprüth Magers Berlin.

Andreas Gursky is showing his series Ocean I-VI at Sprüth Magers Berlin right now.  The images are large – all around 2.5-3.5 m x 3m+, and originated in the kinds of views on flight monitors that show whatever the plane is flying over.  These are all images of the oceans, the land shows as busy little fragments around the edge: peripheral and of no great mystery compared to the seas which show as deep and silent.

Gursky apprenticed with Bernd and Hilla Becher, and something of their stillness underlies all his work.  While Ocean I-VI might look like straight satellite images, and indeed the bits of land are from satellite photos, the oceans themselves have been constructed.  There are no clouds or storms, their proportions aren't geographically correct – they take cartographic licence as all maps do.

These pieces of water all have names, but Gursky has called them simply Ocean I, Ocean II; just as land doesn't have all the political and economic markings we understand as constituting land inscribed on its surface, neither do the oceans have pink dotted lines floating on them marking 250-miles limits, or large letters floating across them saying Pacific Ocean.  Really, maps as we know them, are very crude. 

Gursky has, for many years, done large photographs of large things: immaculate and perfectly regimented crowds in North Korea, flattened screens of social housing projects, any repetitive elements that are so vast in number that they become a kind of colour field, which of course is the thing that pulls him away from the often near-identical photographs of Ed Burtynsky.  Repetition and the small shifts in detail in like objects were at the core of the Becher's work: I doubt they were wildly interested in water towers although they photographed hundreds of them. Their project was photographic, setting the camera in a precise and repetitive relationship with the subject, removing all the seductive elements the camera so easily exploits: colour, sun and shade, fast-frame capture of birds, wind, people.

Much is written about Gursky's work as a critique of capitalism: here are capitalism's excesses, with Burtynsky, Gursky and Polidori as a club going about documenting all its evils.  I'm not sure this is quite how it is, or all that it is.  There is a photographic project here, rather than a documentary project.  Oceans I-VI is not documentary, it is a construction of a mystery, of inaccessibility, of understanding something one can only see in the abstract; the near-impossibility of clicking out of the abstract into some sort of existential, phenomenological present, which can only be found at the scale of standing with one's feet in the water at Departure Bay and thinking 'this water goes to Japan'. 

small investments

Unilever India. Lifebuoy soap There was a thing on the radio this morning: BBCs Global Business, talking about a campaign to get everyone in the world to wash their hands after using the toilet.  Diarrhoea kills a million children each year, preventable by simple hand-washing with soap.  So Unilever, Proctor & Gamble – all the big corporations that make soap were approached and a strategy to provide both soap and initiative launched.

One of the most interesting things was to do with the size of the bar of soap.  The standard 500g bar is too expensive for the world's poor: it isn't that the soap is too expensive, but the investment in a large bar is impossible if one's income comes in daily and is spent daily.  By experimenting with 100g and 50g bars, it was found the the 100g bar of soap was both affordable and purchased.

This is an example of C K Prahalad's theory that there are vast markets at the bottom on the economic scale: sell millions of small things cheaply for much the same return as selling a couple of large expensive products.  Two loaded Ferraris or 2000 Tatas.

Prahalad felt that the poorest of the poor, who have ambitions and aspirations, make deliberate choices about where they put what money they have.  Their capital may be small, but it is capital nonetheless.  Discounting it because it is small and erratic, denies the poor access to many of the products that could improve their lives in terms of nutrition and health – the poor are denied any agency that their small incomes might give them.  Prahalad's view of capitalism from the bottom was tied to the issue of human rights.  He died a couple of months ago; he was only  68.

eikonostasia

Rutger Huibert. Ekklisakia, Greece, 2010

Evangelos Kotsioris and Rutger Huiberts, Rutger studying architecture at TU Delft, and Evangelos at the GSD, sent their survey of roadside eikonostasia in Greece for On Site 23: small things.  These are little shrines placed where someone has died in a traffic accident and Huiberts and Kotsioris talk about the transition from hand-made to manufactured shrines. 

We have roadside memorials here in Canada, in increasing numbers: mostly bunches and garlands of plastic and silk flowers tied to crosses, or telephone poles, littered with stuffed toys and scraps of paper – unruly, angry, sad, unresolved.  We didn't always do this.  I remember the first time I saw a roadside memorial when I drove to Kansas in the mid 80s: crossed the border into the States and there they were.  Had I ever seen one in Canada I would have taken them for granted, but I'd never seen such a thing before. 

As Huiberts and Kotsioris point out, they also act as road warnings.  In Montana, again in the 80s – don't know if they still do this– highway fatalities were officially marked by small white metal crosses: not memorials, just markers.  On the famous and very beautiful Going to the Sun Highway in Glacier Park every time you came around a sharp corner to find a fantastic view of yet more mountains, the foreground would have a flock of crosses where cars had taken the corner too quickly and someone had died.  It was very sobering.

Roadside shrines and markers are now the subtext to travel by car — a dark chorus to the freedom of the road.  Are our highway verges littered with wandering spirits consoling themselves with teddy bears and wreaths?  I'm not sure about this – not the spirits, but the need for flowers and toys.  I would hope that they have moved on.

street level

 Victoria Beltrano. Spadina and Dundas, Toronto. February 2010Victoria Beltrano has a good study in On Site 23: small things on the interface between the private building and the public world.  This interface happens at doorways and windows where the street wall of downtown buildings inflect slightly.   She shows one back alley behind a shopping centre appropriated by street traders who use tiny hooks and wires on the otherwise blank wall to hang their stuff on.  Another example is the four-inch ledge on a Shopper's DrugMart window lined with small steel points to keep people from appropriating the ledge to sit on. The third example is a doorway and attached vestibule in Chinatown with a step at the sidewalk that is used as an informal shelter, bus stop waiting area, a place to warm up in the winter. 

The point of the article is the degree of humanity allowed in the urban environment by how the surfaces of buildings at the street level are designed.  Hostile to indifferent to welcoming, much it seems has to do with propriety, possessiveness and sheer good nature.  or not. 

I think we all know how to design a good doorway, or a generous and welcoming window: it isn't our incapacity to make a city beloved; rather it is the citizens themselves who make decisions about children in the city, or the accommodation of the infirm, or buskers, or nomadic marketeers.  Some cities are intolerant.  Some are more easy-going, allowing informal life to happen in all sorts of nooks and crannies, in all sorts of unplanned ways. 

How would we put it to City Hall: we want planning departments and police forces to lighten up?  We want to legislate generosity?  We want a law to make everyone kind?  Yes, sure.

parkettes

Department of Unusual Certainties. Parkettes, Toronto March 2010

Department of Unusual Certainties is a research group in Toronto which is holding a magazine launch for On Site 23: small things this Thursday evening at the Toronto Free Gallery.

Their connection to On Site came with this issue where they sent us part of their massive Parkette study.  Parkettes are very very tiny parks, left over pieces of ground really, strips of grass on a median, front yard setbacks to city buildings, scraps of ground between two roads too small to develop, which nonetheless have been named and are officially part of Toronto's park system. 

They speak to the ad hoc use of public space in an urban environment: the question for most cities is whether the City itself looks after it – one can think of all the petanque or boules boulevards throughout Europe – or whether such public space appears to be un-owned and therefore rubbish.

The distinction is going to be in the degree of civic responsibility felt by each citizen. Are these corners of park 'owned' by the citizens and respected as such, or, again, are they rubbish?  Will they be the site of a guerilla garden and left to flourish, or will the city parks department keep them as shaved grass, denoting the parkette's listing on the parks register?

We are a nation of front and back yards where our gardening attention is private and personal, where city parks are visual 'green space' with little use unless they contain a bunch of playground equipment.  The centrality of public parks in our civic daily lives rarely attains the centrality of Central Park, for example.  When almost everyone lives in apartments, people value parks, deeply.  The city is made beautiful when all its corners, its trees, its thin strips of grass, are loved. 

wild salmon

There is a disaster playing out in the Gulf of Mexico which will destroy fish and seafood stocks for generations.  There is an ongoing disaster playing out on our coasts, also destroying fish and seafood stocks for generations. 

I have to package up On Site 23: small things over the next few days so shall post this video for everone to watch: it is manifesto, ode to the coast, ode to our silver brothers in crisis, it is beautiful and necessary. 

The Migration Begins! - The "Get Out for Wild Salmon" Video from Twyla Roscovich on Vimeo.

The site that this comes from is salmonaresacred.org

chernobyl

Steve Chodoriwsky. Chernobyl, May 2010

Steve Chodoriwsky sent these two pictures of Chernobyl yesterday, from, as he puts it, a sunny and summery Kyiv.  Hard to believe that the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown happened almost 25 years ago, in 1986, before the Soviet Union disbanded.  The mid-1980s seemed to be when the USSR was at its darkest and most intransigent.  Chernenko had briefly succeeded the also brief Andropov after a long two decades of Brezhnev and in 1985 Gorbachev came to power.  And soon it was all over.
 
Chernobyl spread radioactive dust all over Europe affecting people, crops, livestock: the dawning that the environment does not actually have political borders in it.  Chernobyl itself was abandoned, although I've read several novels about a kind of feral life that goes on in the abandoned city.
  
No matter how hard-edged urban life is, this is what will happen within a single generation if we just let everything go.  All the stone, the concrete, the asphalt, solid as it seems, clearly needs much maintenance and attention: there is a symbiosis here in such architecture and infrastructure.  It needs us, while in our minds I sometimes wonder if we only think about how much we need it.  

Steve Chodoriwsky. Chernobyl, May 2010

love lies bleeding

Stuart Gordon, Calgary Herald. Love Lies Bleeding dress rehearsal, May 5 2010

Love Lies Bleeding, Alberta Ballet. Jean Gand-Maitre, choreographer.

Ballet lite this isn't.  It is dark, dark, dark, in the way that Berlin cabaret had its dark eroticism.  By comparison it is the old Frederick Ashton-type ballets, all romantic with tutus, that seem very light.  The themes of Elton John's life are large and powerful: identity, addiction, AIDS and celebrity: ubiquitous as these themes might seem, they are not normal little narratives.  They are disturbing and operatic.
The recorded soundtrack belts out at rock concert volumes; many of the cuts were live versions so there is additional crowd frenzy. As no doubt in John's life itself, there is no respite: scenes, songs, costumes and crises are relentless. There is a large video screen as backdrop commenting and contextualising, and sometimes amplifying, what is being danced below it.  

From the first step this ballet does not pretend, as ballet has for so long, to be about heterosexuality: it is overtly homoerotic.  Along with the classic entrechats and bourrées are several Tom of Finland moments; along with dancers on point there are just as many in stiletto boots; the outstandingly revealing but traditional tights and leotards of classical male dancers are sent over the top with huge striped codpieces worn by all, male and female.  Flesh glistens, buttocks are thonged, S & M clichés pound on, the audience popularity prize went to three dancers in drag.

Our wee hero, supposedly an Elton fan, but clearly Elton John as a fan of his own narrative, is mostly seen as small and nekkid, and who dresses up sometimes, but is always left on his own at the end of some dramatic event, coping alone.  or not coping.  The scale shift between the larger than life corps de ballet and this small person is exploited throughout: one gets the sense, that despite the sensational leaps and bounds of Yukichi Hattori (who was dancing the lead the night I saw this), there was an absolute vulnerability to the lead dancer, usually assigned to the prima ballerina in conventional ballets.  The two pas de deux between men were so much more moving, and sexual, than the gender and power imbalance in the traditional pas de deux where the male is the often wooden support and armature for the fluttering, tragic female heroine.

One can see that Love Lies Bleeding has the potential to develop audiences that turn out in star-shaped glasses, platform boots and feather boas in the way that fans who go to the Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Sound of Music do.  It is perhaps inevitable, but unfortunate.  Is part of John's celebrity, in this age of celebrity, that the public refuses to look past the costuming?  The rose-coloured glasses, the Liberace excess, the gay hilarity of performance: they are all in this ballet, but they sit on a bedrock of terrible personal confusion and loss, also all in this ballet.

issue 23 issue release party

Department of Unusual Certainties is holding an issue release party for On Site 23: small things at Toronto Free Gallery May 20th.

This party is sponsored by Sweeny Sterling Finlayson &Co Architects Inc and Steam Whistle Brewing — what generous champions!

The contributors to this issue from the Toronto area will give a short shout on the small things they wrote about, photographed, drew, thought about and submitted to On Site.

All welcome.

chanel povera

Tommy Ton. Jak & Jil, 1/05/2010from Jak & Jil this week.

material and conceptual sustainability

EMBT. Spanish Pavilion at Shanghai Expo 2010When the Shanghai Expo opened a few days ago, one of the tv news clips was shot in front of the Spanish pavilion designed by Benedetta Tagliabue of Miralles Tagliabue (EMBT).  Clearly very photogenic, its skin consists of thousands of grass, raffia, wicker and reed mats laid like loose shingles on a steel frame heaped up on the site like a pile of ribbon.  The mats were woven in Shandong Province; the pavilion has three exhibition rooms focussing on Spanish film makers.  It all seems conceptually and materially clear. 
Good series of photographs can be seen at designboom and dezeen. 

Might we spare a few moments of thought for the Canadian pavilion, a big steel frame 'C' covered in Canadian Western Red Cedar, cut in our forests and shipped from BC to China.  One can still see logging trucks on Vancouver Island carrying obviously old growth cedar 5 or 6' in diameter: it will be seen someday as criminal as killing elephants or whales.  And to what end?  To make a great big opaque wooden 'C' in a distant country.  It seems conceptually trivial and materially profligate.

Cirque de Soleil. Canadian pavilion, Shanghai Expo 2010

Bill Burns

Bill Burns. Safety Gear for Small Animals. Respirator, 10 x 11 x 6 cm, 1994/1999Bill Burns is originally from Saskatchewan, studied at Goldsmiths, now lives in Toronto, has work in major collections here and abroad.  He is best known for his series Safety Gear for Small Animals, 1996-2000, a collection of tiny helmets, gas masks, life jackets, hazmat suits and goggles for rats and gophers and other tiny neighbours.
 
Curiously the effect does not anthropomorphise the animals, the little life jackets simply remind us that we don't look after animals at all.  If not actively trying to exterminate them, we ignore them, so busy are we looking after ourselves as we elbow our way into the lifeboat, first leaving everyone else to go down with the ship. 

Safety Gear for Small Animals led to the more recent project, Boiler Suits for Primates, 2006 which is a suitcase of miniature versions of all the things given to people incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay: orange jumpsuits, rubber thongs, towels, a bucket, toothpaste.  These are considered the bleak essentials of life it seems, and by putting them into the context of Safety Gear for Small Animals, the parallel to zoos is undeniable.  Detainees are stripped of their humanity, but still given toothpaste.

The ambiguity between mankind and animalkind is the subject of Burns' work.  It is a similar project to that of Yann Martel who uses animals as eloquent voices of the blindly fumbling human condition.  George Orwell was another.  Somehow when the rather selfish ambitions of human beings are made to come out clear and pure from the mouths of animals who, if we think about them at all, we consider innocents, we are shocked.

cat's eyes

We don't see these cat's eyes road markings here, but they are used throughout Britain.  Two mirror-backed glass marbles reflect headlights at night and mark centre lines and road edges.  They can be white, red, yellow, green or blue indicating different road conditions.
They were invented in 1933 by Percy Shaw, who patented them and then set about manufacturing them.  The glass marbles are set in a rubber block mounted in a metal casting embedded in the road.  If a car drives over it, it is pushed into the road and the rubber decompresses after, raising it up again.  There is a small reservoir that collects rain which washes the glass marbles keeping them clean. 

In my youth I spent a summer in England with the Commonwealth Youth Movement, and we were billetted with various county families as we travelled about.  Staying somewhere in Yorkshire and driving home after some do we were at, no doubt at an army base, I noticed that my billetter turned off his headlights whenever we went through a village or small town, and then turned them on again when on the open road.  Not on full, just on dipped, which shines about 5' in front of the car.  It all seemed quite dark to me, not to say dangerous. 

However, then, you didn't put on your headlights while going through villages as they would shine into people's windows and disturb them, besides there were dim streetlights or light from other people's windows to give enough light to drive by.  On the open road, the cat's eyes caught even dipped headlights far enough ahead to be a sufficient guide.  Cars didn't go fast: small winding roads and small engines did not allow it, also the phrase 'mustn't frighten the horses' comes to mind.  Life was deferential, quiet, frugal, measured.  People invented things.  They were allowed to be eccentric, as evidently Percy Shaw became. 

I doubt that any of this exists anymore in our over-developed OECD countries, however, one could travel the world looking for quiet, frugal, measured, polite societies where life is slow rather than headlong, and I expect one would find people inventing things of great usefulness – an eccentric concept in itself.  

red desert 2

Monica Vitti and Richard Harris. Il deserto rosso. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964

This is a trailer (which I can't figure out how to embed here) with the boppy kind of soundtrack typical of 1960s Italy.  It is misleading, as Giovanni Fusco's Il deserto rosso soundtrack is generally abstract and electronic, but if anything, this overly kooky music is the part of pop-Italy that also produced bright little Olivetti typewriters, the Isetta and Ettore Sottsass.
 
Antonioni's early films are black and white 1950s epics of bleak betrayal, then he did the black, white and red Il deserto rosso, then got to England and did Blow-Up in full colour – lots of decadent fun: the Red Desert party in Ravenna looks like kindergarten in comparison, then Zabriskie Point in Los Angeles where colour and consumer excess literally exploded all over the screen.   Italy hurtled from postwar, Carlo Scarpa sobriety to jangling technicolour instability so fast it lost its head and replaced it with Berlusconi. 

Despite the bizarreness of this assemblage of segments, it has a shot of an industrial landscape (between 1:30 and 1:40 – even better watch it in full screen), illustrating why I find Burtynsky's photos of industrial landscapes so didactic, so condescendingly instructive.  

the red desert

Thinking about the Isetta and the 1960s and, despite its current reputation, the space and quiet of many things of the late 60s and early 70s.  I once used to spend hours watching French and Italian films in London at inexpensive, near-empty matinee showings.  The Red Desert is an existential classic: 1964, not much of a plot, just a troubled woman, her general anxiety in the world; the world pretty colourless but also surreal in its industrial, unforgiving, spare unbeauty.  Long stretches without dialogue, most of it shot with a telephoto lens – God how I loved this stuff.  It was my interior landscape, and often my exterior one as well. 
This very small clip is completely typical:

I must say, despite all those endless classes in the urbane civic landscapes of a Europe we were taught to aspire to, these grey streets were more like what I found there.  Even in the late 1980s, a train stop away from Barcelona landed you in streets like this: suspicious, empty, grudging.

voiturettes

Iso IsettaThere used to be an Isetta parked on my street, perhaps the most minimal car possible.  Generally known as micro-cars and big in postwar Japan and Europe, the Daimler Smart is our current version, which, no surprise somehow, was originally developed by Swatch in the late 1980s and taken to Mercedes-Benz.  Smart fortwos are okay, but lack the charm of the Isetta, which was at least pretty.  Isetta was originally developed by Iso SpA in Turin in 1953, and then licensed to other manufacturers such as BMW.  They are 90" long by 54" wide, 770 lbs. 
Best site for pictures is the Microcar Museum

The micro-cars of the 50s used 2-stroke motorcycle motors and were essentially enclosed motor scooters, but with a steering wheel rather than cycle handles.  One got in and out of the Isetta through the front which was one big door with the steering wheel and dashboard panel attached.  Gina in Heartbeat used to have one before she got her pale blue VW Beetle.
The Isetta had four wheels, but there were many other lines of tiny cars with three-wheels – reportedly the earliest of cars from the 1880s.  Three wheels have a few stability problems, this is why the Isetta put two wheels quite close together at the back.   Three-wheelers are still being developed, including the Campagna T-Rex in Montréal which is too obviously a muscular motorcycle with a ghastly fibreglas carapace pulled out of a computer game. 

Much has been on the news lately about speed, accidents and Calgary roads.  I would hesitate to take a microcar onto Deerfoot Trail, in fact I don't even take my very nimble, very fast saab onto Deerfoot Trail – it is a suicidal road.  But there are plenty of other roads with less pressure on them.  Speeds are 50-60 rather than 110; you get there.  Although contemporary microcars have normal-car running speeds, little cars like the Isetta had 50kph as their top speed: they are cars for cities, which, last time I heard, most of us live in.  

the Holzweg

Arndt Menke-Zumbrägel. Holzweg, 2008Arndt Menke's wood bike uses wood as a sophisticated material, rather than a low-tech material that shows its vegetative lineage.  There is a standard set of images of the Holzweg, found on several design websites, that show its details, parts and assembly.

Arndt Menke-Zumbrägel. Holzweg. Laminated bentwood back wheel strut.It is possible that this too is mainly a bamboo bicycle as the photos show wood tubes for the frame pieces.  Reamed wood wouldn't be as strong as bamboo with its hollow integrity.  The most interesting part, a bentwood, laminated back wheel strut, is not, as far as I can find, discussed at all. The bentwood piece is laminated from four shaped pieces and then shaped to fit into the tubular metal lugs.  This would give it both strength and spring, giving some suspension movement in the back wheel.

Arndt Menke-Zumbruagel. Holzweg. Forming the bentwood back wheel strut.The frame weighs 2.3 kg.  A comparably responsive ride, a full suspension frame, ranges from 2kg to 5kg (2.8 for aluminum might be typical). 

We've gone through a long period of time where as individuals we have been told we can't make anything ourselves.  We certainly can't fix our own cars, where once everyone was his own mechanic.  What I like about all these wood bikes is that one could actually make one without a metal workshop, without welding equipment and a welding ticket.  These bikes are about assembly of parts, rather than sealed monolithic units, bought ready to go and only repairable by professionals.  That just seems so disengaged now.


bambucicletas

Having been away from my home and native land for four months, in my other home and native land, I have been surprisingly disoriented since being back.  After looking at  a small house project Saturday in the far south west, I came back with the contractor I generally work with when I do such things so he could collect his old Sawsall which I borrowed four years ago to hack out some joists set too high for a floor I was replacing.  It was a long story and brute violence was needed to solve it.  Anyway, my front room was a mess: half unpacked, stacks of papers everywhere.  I bleated 'magazine', 'moving', 'ill', 'too much', etc.  and then spent the rest of the afternoon simply clearing my work table.  I now have a tidy stack of little notes of ideas.  I have similar stacks in each room – neat things I read, or hear on the radio, or think of, fascinating bits of news.  What to do with these little notes, each worthy of a dissertation at least.  If I work through them here for a bit, I can throw them away.  It won't be a series of dissertations, but I can air them and let them go.

This is the danger of misc files: they are brilliant, and unwieldly, and provocative, and oppressive, inducing much guilt that one is not pursuing them, working them out, making connections.

So.  Bamboo bikes

First patented in 1894, bamboo frames are lightweight, responsive and quiet. Bamboo is evidently 17% stronger than steel in certain directions.  Craig Calfee in Santa Cruz has been producing high-tech bamboo bikes for several years and is the acknowledged expert, although bamboo bikes have long been built in China.

Calfee Bamboo Cargo bike, built in Ghana. The back wheel is bamboo-reinforced and capable of carrying 640 lbs.The straight pieces are heat treated bamboo.  Instructables has step-by-step  instructions on how to build such a bike: it mortices the bamboo together at the joints and then makes hemp and fibreglas reinforced wrappings around the joints.  Better pictures are here.

The other way to join the pieces is to use carbon fibre, steel or other metal pre-formed lugs into which the bamboo poles fit.  Otherwise, one needs all the rest of the parts: chain, wheels and brakes recycled from ordinary bikes.  The front fork is often metal it seems, rather than bamboo: something to do with stability.

The Bamboo Bike Project in Ghana, Kenya and other African countries was started by several people in different research units at the Earth Institute, Columbia University. BBP is setting up bamboo bike production in local workshops, with local bamboo, that are sturdier than metal bikes and more suited to carrying loads over rough roads. 

There are, of course, obsessives who are working to make everything out of bamboo as a kind of pure design exercise.  Flavio Deslandes is a Brasilian industrial designer living in Denmark. His bike uses a back brake which is much more elegant than all those cables.  Evidently there is much research into bamboo spokes, but couldn't find any pics except for the bamboo reinforcing on the cargo bike above.

Flavio Deslandes. Bambucicleta. Rio de JaneiroIt's all quite exciting, and there are pages of websites, so it must be quite a common project.  I just hadn't heard of it. 

last week

How easy it is to break a routine and how hard to get back to it.
 
Last week drove 1100 km from from summer back into winter, from one culture to another, much the same as driving from Paris to Madrid or in distance, from St Petersburg to Moscow and back again.
 
Last week got On Site 23: small things to the printer.  They have bought a new Heidelburg press, an enormous thing the size and appearance of a locomotive engine.  Everything that was in the space it now occupies has been shuffled about – lots of untaped drywall everywhere, z-shaped corridors – but that's okay, there is this new princess in the building that everything defers to.

Getting an issue to the printer is a horrible marathon of moving commas, getting names spelled right, aligning images.  It goes on and on for days ending only when I force the layout onto a cd and deliver it, otherwise I would shoot myself.
 
Last week I unpacked, in a manner of speaking: I took things out of small packages whereupon they exploded all over and I can't find anywhere for them to go.  It would be nice to throw everything away.  Clearly I have too much stuff.  As a corrective I shall look at Jens Thiel's  monobloc site again:

Hannes Geiseler. Plastic chair repair, India, 2009