Tuesday, October 16, 2007

wheezed rhapsody bellows

In this cafe/bar there is...
  • one couple with half-pints staring off in opposing directions, apparantly lost in contemplation. it's not a fight, it's not a grudging autumn-ending, it's just life.
  • Paul Spence/Deaner from Fubar. He has a moosestache, not a moustache these days.
  • a couple of the steely locals diligently climbing into Tuesday's bag.
  • someone who's got a wirebrush goatee and expressive eyes, like a blue-peepered Don Cherry as puppeteered by William H. Macy.
  • a Swede hipster
  • the ambipresent Vic Vogel (here and Barfly are the only places I ever see him)
  • and a guy who looks like hes doing pretty much the same thing as me, though he's got a pint in front of him. I don't have anything in front of me save the Plough, which I'm trying to put my hand to now and generate an instant work ethic. My fields have lain fallow long enough...

...but first, butt first!

Perhaps one of you three dear readers will this about me, likelily not, but I want to be a landscape architect. There, I said it. I love writing, but I feel it should be like happiness, "not the destination, but the path" and I found setting writing as a goal in itself somehow made it unobtainable and obscured some pretty good ideas, if I do say so myself, (which I do, which is hardly ever a good idea and so obviously they're not all good ideas...) and I'm going to out-wit myself by moonlighting as something I can inter myself with, and that's this. Landscape architecture.

Curse the pragmatics for now, I just 'like' greenery and design. I want to see ecological integration as a course of technological innovation, and though GREEN is voguish right now, it's almost always how I've always thought, I want to help blur the delineation between interior/exterior (perhaps a tough thing to do in this climate, with the coils of private security tightening around public consciousness), and believe that paradise can be meted out to all in large enough increments for everyone to be involved, and thus responsible, but in small enough parcels that planning for it does not get glassy-eyed under utopiates. There's enough of a movement now to join in professionally and not struggle (like I have been - thank my kind makers for keeping me kept). And we seem to now at least have the diagnostic tools to appraise and inform a better approach to our planet, if not the economic will or tomorow's imagination (but those will be here in short order, if only for the money). Which leads me to a fairly crucial point: Not to sound like a money-grubber, but right now is also a time of speculation. Ecological values necessitate economical tenets, and so, once we're on the right path, Green "alternatives" will also be the most cost-effective... But now, well right now and over the next little while, it's going to yield a different green. So I guess I literally am a money grubber: play with dirt for cash. Oh yes.

I expressed my interest in this area to a classmate when I first met her, and she told me about a decent landscape architecture site: Pruned. I haven't fully explored it yet, but I had seen this installation in Chile before, featured in a landscaper's magazine. How classically sublime.

Since writing the paragraph above, I've dipped into Pruned even more and found that the writing's tight and the issues compelling. I saw something there that I'd heard of before, but not known much about... this post made me see more things... For the shock value found in its disturbing immediacy, there is a picture on this post that really delivers the message about the garbage centered gyres (the currented oceanic systems the sea-dwellers use to migrate) and their rapid growth.

My other friend in that class, leaning towards architecture proper, informed me of his architectural crush, Paolo Soleri who founded this multidisciplinary field experiment/tutelage center which envisioned this drawjopper.

2 comments:

Eve said...

Check email

Sparky said...

There were some past convergences with you and I, but this one is pretty synchronous...Perhaps you checked out Moshe Safdie last night? If not, I've got a brief sally into the architectural world by way of a summary of his talk. Obviously we've both got design and nature on the brain right now. Perchance it's just a vitalism thing...