I like old postcards and cartography. These are really pretty.

This guy is right, I should be vegan. The last line in this article is haunting. I have so much work to do!

Steve Lambert gave a lecture as part of the Visual Art Lecture Series at Bennington College. After the above introduction was played he explained that his lecture would follow the format of all lectures by artists:

exercises (the removal of our shoes)
show work (see below)
where he comes from (a monk and a nun)
more work (again, see below)
various tangents (I do not remember these)
q & a (check!)

He spoke about many of his projects. Some of my favorites were:

Add-Art
The New York Times Special Edition
The Department of Fill in the Blank
Co-op Bar (!)
Emma Goldman Institute for Anarchist Studies

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These images are from the Pratt Schoolhouse, once located across the street from where the Pomfret Center, Connecticut post office is today. A few of the children are ghosts and witches, there is a nurse, a cow, and a Snow White. The costumes are very unique, but I have no idea who or what many of the children intended to look like with their costumes. Help me out!

There are also a few clues around the classroom regarding what the students were studying. Nine years later the town’s new Pomfret Community School for grades K-12 was completed.

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This is the view from my Swan Garage studio. The maintenance facility can be seen in the mid-ground. I is nice to work with the door open, but it is getting colder and this will no longer be an option. Faculty parking is directly in front of the doors, and therefore views are spoiled for much of the day. I currently have the following books checked out of Crossett Library:

Breakfast Lunch Tea by Rose Carrarini
David Smith 1905-1965 by the Fogg Art Museum
Defiant Gardens by Kenneth I. Helphand
Eating Architecture edited by Jamie Horwitz and Paulette Singley
Floor Plan Manual edited by Friederike Schneider
Futurist Cookbook, The by Marinetti
Housing + Single Family Housing by Manuel Gausa
Lois Orswell, David Smith, and Modern Art by Marjorie B. Cohn
Pamphlet Architecture by Mark Janson

I love the above episode from auto-tune the news. It is the most enjoyable of all of them. Also…the pope as environmentalist and a program for inner city residents to learn about growth. A message for those who live in housing developments and an alternative lifestyle.

bt-dubbs, these are my classes this term:

Advanced Workshop for Painting and Drawing, Ann Pibal, M 2:10-6pm
Russia: Bolsheviks to Baristas, Eileen Scully, M,Th 6:30-8:20pm
Post Dymaxion House, Blake Goble, T 10:10-12pm, 2:10-4pm
Artist’s Portfolio, Dana Reitz, T 4:10-6pm
Visual Art Lecture Series, Visual Arts Faculty, T 7:30-9pm

I have a nice studio in Swan Garage.

Chris Dodd wrote an op-ed for the Meriden Record-Journal detailing why he has changed his mind regarding marriage in the state of Connecticut. Below is an excerpt from that op-ed. Hooray for changing minds!

“…I believe that effective leaders must be able and willing to grow and change over their service. I certainly have during mine – and so has the world. Thirty-five years ago, who could have imagined that we’d have an African-American President of the United States?

My young daughters are growing up in a different reality than I did. Our family knows many same-sex couples – our neighbors in Connecticut, members of my staff, parents of their schoolmates. Some are now married because the Connecticut Supreme Court and our state legislature have made same-sex marriage legal in our state.

But to my daughters, these couples are married simply because they love each other and want to build a life together. That’s what we’ve taught them. The things that make those families different from their own pale in comparison to the commitments that bind those couples together.

And, really, that’s what marriage should be. It’s about rights and responsibilities and, most of all, love.

I believe that, when my daughters grow up, barriers to marriage equality for same-sex couples will seem as archaic, and as unfair, as the laws we once had against inter-racial marriage.

And I want them to know that, even if he was a little late, their dad came down on the right side of history…”

via the blog of Chris Dodd.

An excerpt from Cradle to Cradle by William McDonough and Michael Braungart:

“The SoHo and TriBeCa neighborhoods in lower Manhattan continue to thrive because their buildings were designed with several enduring advantages that today would not be considered efficient: they have high ceilings and large, high windows that let in daylight, thick walls that balance daytime heat with nighttime coolness…Their appeal and usefulness is enduringly apparent.”

Donald Judd would agree, see! I saw his home and studio in New York last term. It was a beautiful building.

An excerpt from “The Butterfly” a poem by Arun Kolatkar printed in Jejuri:

“Just a pinch of yellow,
it opens before it closes
and closes before it o

where is it”

An excerpt from a lecture by the fictional Elizabeth Costello in the Lives of Animals by J.M. Coetzee:

“Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.”

The book ended with four reflections from others, including one by Peter Singer. I had been wondering if Peter singer would save his daughter or his dog and in his reflection he writes, “I’m your father, of course I would have saved my lovely baby daughter. But the point is, normal humans have capacities that far exceed those of nonhuman animals, and some of these capacities are morally significant in particular contexts.”

An excerpt from Morpho Eugenia by A.S. Byatt

“‘They take your dress for the sky itself,’ he whispered. She stood very still, turning her head this way and that. More and more butterflies made their way through the air, more and more hung trembling on the blue sheen of the cloth, on the pearly-white of her hands and throat.”

(I spent a lot of my summer here and here.)

An excerpt from My Summer in a Garden by Charles Dudley Warner

“The principal value of a private garden is not understood. It is not to give the possessor vegetables and fruit (that can be better and cheaper done by the market gardeners), but to teach him patience and philosophy, and the higher virtues,–hope deferred, and expectations blighted, leading directly to resignation, and sometimes to alienation. The garden thus becomes a moral agent, a test of character, as it was in the beginning…I mean to have a moral garden, if it is not a productive one,–one that shall teach, O my brothers! O my sisters! the great lessons of life.

I read most of this book while on the subway. It was the least applicable.

An excerpt from Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman

“‘Why do you keep saying that?’ he asked in response. “Apples and oranges aren’t that different, really. I mean, they’re both fruit. Their weight is extremely similar. They both contain acidic elements. They’re both roughly spherical. They serve the same social purpose. With the possible exception of a tangerine, I can’t think of anything more similar to an orange than an apple If I was having lunch with a man who was eating an apple and–while I was looking away– he replaced that apple with an orange, I doubt I’d even notice.”

An excerpt from Wicked Plants by Amy Stewart

“One day in 1845 a Scottish tailor named Duncan Gow ate a sandwich made with wild greens his children had collected for him. Within a few hours, he was dead. The children had made the fatal mistake of confusing the lacy foliage of parsley with that of poison hemlock.”

BK Farmyards is attempting to turn underutilized land in Brooklyn, New York into farmland. The website includes information on what legislation to watch, what they are growing, and how they would like to grow. There is a benefit for the farmyard this Saturday. Watch the video for some philosophy and hope.

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In early June the above moth was seen in my driveway. It appeared to be dying, and I did eventually find it dead and decomposing. I wish that I had preserved it…her. Based on the shape of the abdomen it is a female. I moved the corpse on to a brick after she had died, and the wingspan was very nearly the width of the brick. She reminds me of Groucho Marx.

I later identified the moth from the above photograph. The upperside of the forewing is grey with the bottom third being lighter. It has a jadded edge. The hindwings are colorful, and the antennae are thin. I believe that it is a Pachysphinx modesta, or Modest sphinx. It can be found throughout the United States and Canada and is fairly common. It is usually found near rivers and streams. The caterpillars feed on Populus and Salix. What causes me to question the species is its size. The moth that I saw had to have been six or seven inches, but the Pachysphinx modesta is usually between three and five inches. Pachysphinx occidentalis, or Big Poplar sphinx, looks similar and is larger but is only found in the Western half of North America.

Last week another large moth was resting on a window pane. It is Antheraea polyphemus. Below is a photograph of the underside of its wings.