CA museum highlights

1. sheriff badges, gene autry museum of western heritage, LA
2. dire wolf skulls, page museum/la brea tar pits, LA
3. crow vs. raven, santa barbara natural history museum
4. s.b.n.h.m.

here rests a woodsman of the world

all in colma, CA. also: death as sleep metaphor turned pillow party; colma vanity is on point.

window full of portraits from the newspaper- my immediate thought/hope was that they were all the pointillism pictures from the WSJ joke box but it could be something else. let's pretend not, though. while we're debating, here's some holiday cheer/horror!

colma

oh thank goodness, finally made it to the modern-day necropolis that is colma, CA today. started things off with a military cemetery- technically in south san francisco- that hypnotized...


then moved on to pets rest pet cemetery in colma- the first i've been to, and perhaps the cemetery i've wandered around that made my heart hurt the most. lots of homemade markers. the spot has been in operation since 1947, and has a truly incredible mural as well.






to be continued...

san francisco

that holiday glow

MIT museum had an open house for new holography installations. all of a sudden like, i'm whizzing around on an electric scooter, facing slices & soda & finding dapper storyboards in abandoned rooms.

ginkgos, turkey toes, hope it's delicious!

bedouin's day

how to make a nature museum: birds, study 1

for years now, my desktop has been this image: i've since lost track of who took it, but it's not that much of a leap to figure that i'm inordinately attracted to photographs of bird displays in natural history museums. a few recent sightings...


mr. finney takes lovely photographs and posts 'em here- this is at the biologika museet in stockholm.

jeongmee yoon's 2002 series from a natural history museum at (i believe) kyunghi university in korea..



hey also, check out katie reis, she's really cool and does great work, and you could become an urban land scout!

just signed an email 'best to you in these dark-and-getting-darker days'- things aren't so shabby, just not so well-lit, at all. best to you in these etc. etc.

my dad converted a 1937 sailboat into a rowboat. today i went up to maine and we introduced the worthy vessel to salt water, at pine point. with a crab sandwich aboard, a seal following in our wake & some truly large fish jumping around, it was the perfect way to spend a foggy day.


pre-launch, some fine foliage at the homestead.

went to the decordova today; always a joy. lincoln, MA in october in a bit of rain makes me rather happy. one of my favorite photographs of all time is still up in the museum, for just a bit longer- by neal slavin, from his "groups in america" portfolio, this one is "Cemetery Workers and Greens Attendants Union Local 365 S.E.I.U. A.F.L. C.I.O., Ridgewood, New York."

FINAGLE-A-FACTORY-TOUR

turns out, you can go to a bagel factory, for free. and watch conveyor belts endlessly. hurrah!

The Million Dead, too, summ'd up- The Unknown.-

walt, photographed by m. brady, 1860s
(from Walt Whitman's Memoranda During the War- "A Classic Portrait of the Civil War By a Hospital Volunteer Who Became One of America's Greatest Poets -Originally Published in 1875-)



The Dead in this War—there they lie, strewing the fields and woods and valleys and battle-fields of the south—Virginia, the Peninsula—Malvern Hill and Fair Oaks—the banks of the Chickahominy—the terraces of Fredericksburgh—Antietam bridge—the grisly ravines of Manassas—the bloody promenade of the Wilderness—the varieties of the strayed dead, (the estimate of the War department is 25,000 national soldiers kill’d in battle and never buried at all, 5,000 drown’d—15,000 inhumed by strangers, or on the march in haste, in hitherto unfound localities—2,000 graves cover’d by sand and mud by Mississippi freshets, 3,000 carried away by caving-in of banks, &c.,)—Gettysburgh, the West, Southwest—Vicksburgh—Chattanooga—the trenches of Petersburgh—the numberless battles, camps, hospitals everywhere—the crop reap’d by the mighty reapers, typhoid, dysentery, inflammations—and blackest and loathesomest of all, the dead and living burial-pits, the prison-pens of Andersonville, Salisbury, Belle-Isle, &c., (not Dante’s pictured hell and all its woes, its degradations, filthy torments, excell’d those prisons)—the dead, the dead, the dead—our dead—or South or North, ours all, (all, all, all, finally dear to me)—or East or West—Atlantic coast or Mississippi valley—somewhere they crawl’d to die, alone, in bushes, low gullies, or on the sides of hills—(there, in secluded spots, their skeletons, bleach’d bones, tufts of hair, buttons, fragments of clothing, are occasionally found yet)—our young men once so handsome and so joyous, taken from us—the son from the mother, the husband from the wife, the dear friend from the dear friend—the clusters of camp graves, in Georgia, the Carolinas, and in Tennessee—the single graves left in the woods or by the road-side, (hundreds, thousands, obliterated)—the corpses floated down the rivers, and caught and lodged, (dozens, scores, floated down the upper Potomac, after the cavalry engagements, the pursuit of Lee, following Gettysburgh)—some lie at the bottom of the sea—the general million, and the special cemeteries in almost all the States—the infinite dead—(the land entire saturated, perfumed with their impalpable ashes’ exhalation in Nature’s chemistry distill’d, and shall be so forever, in every future grain of wheat and ear of corn, and every flower that grows, and every breath we draw)—not only Northern dead leavening Southern soil—thousands, aye tens of thousands, of Southerners, crumble to-day in Northern earth.

And everywhere among these countless graves—everywhere in the many soldier Cemeteries of the Nation, (there are now, I believe, over seventy of them)—as at the time in the vast trenches, the depositories of slain, Northern and Southern, after the great battles—not only where the scathing trail passed those years, but radiating since in all the peaceful quarters of the land—we see, and ages yet may see, on monuments and gravestones, singly or in masses, to thousands or tens of thousands, the significant word
UNKNOWN.

(In some of the cemeteries nearly all the dead are unknown. At Salisbury, N.C., for instance, the known are only 85, while the unknown are 12,027, and 11,700 of these are buried in trenches. A national monument has been put up here, by order of Congress, to mark the spot—but what visible, material monument can ever fittingly commemorate that spot?)

As I write this conclusion- in the open air, latter part of June, 1875, a delicious forenoon, everything rich and fresh from last night's copius rain- ten years and more have pass'd away since that War, and its wholesome deaths, burials, graves. (They make indeed the true Memoranda of the War- mute, subtle, immortal.)

nick howard's drawings. came across them on a hot tip. been looking at them for a bit, gonna keep looking for a while.

lathe-y rainy friday

here's something to know: the old schwamb mill is on the internet. but more importantly, it's in arlington, and amazing, and you should go. a still-functioning water-powered mill, the rooms are full of pieces of wooden hoops, and there's a glue room, and all sorts of incredibly old writing (predictions of the date of the first snow, 1901) and wallpaper/newspaper on the original walls. my dear friend suzanne mcleod had some art in an opening there last night and we spent the time running around exploring rather than snacking.

if you're in the mood to see some cartoons and boston publisher emphemera, go check out the fourth wall project's show "right thing the wrong way: the story of highwater books." opening last night had some snapple, some dudes eating lightbulbs, etc.