What's in a name? For some, a career : County News : Boulder Daily Camera
Mini-profiles of several Boulder-ites bearing "aptronyms" -- names that are aptly descriptive.\n\nKind of a cool concept for picking people to profile, though I have to disagree with the psychologist quoted in the article and say it's probably just a coincidence...
Midnight Hour: Comment: The New Yorker
A piece by Elizabeth Kolbert (my professional idol) on "midnight regulations." I was happy to see this because Charles Wilkinson just spoke about this issue last week in the Scripps Fellows seminar. It just so happens that a lot of the midnight regulations Bush's administration is trying to pass involve environmental policy.
Bush certainly isn't the only one. From the article:
"According to the National Journal, by the time Clinton left office 'the journalists who cover the White House had thrown up their hands at the prospect of keeping up.'"
Also, attempting to undo them may be futile:
"(President Bush, for all his grumbling—and despite Republican control of Congress for much of his tenure—ended up implementing more than three-quarters of the midnight rules that Clinton had left him, including the one on arsenic, just as they were written.) Alternatively, once in office, Barack Obama could ask his agencies to go through the rule-making process all over again. But, by the time that was finished, a good deal of the damage might already have been done. Once a power plant has been rebuilt, it can’t readily be unrebuilt.
"The Bush Administration, probably as a result of its own experience, is now trying to craft rules that are as difficult as possible to reverse."
Oh, for gosh sakes, I'm excerpting too much... just go read the darn thing!
And another!
Bake or Break — Adventures of an amateur baker
Another delicious baking site from Amy!
Clumbsy Cookie: Could this be the best in the world?
I want to make this chocolate cake so bad!
Britain's fattest pets compete in slimming contest | Lifestyle | Reuters
This is why people don't spend more time reading hard news.
Seriously...wouldn't you rather watch these pets try to lose weight than read about the economy?
(You don't have to answer that question...)
Knight Science Journalism Tracker » BBC: Holy sh@##$%~!@t!! Almost as good: shark poo. On video yet.
Totally the kind of scatalogical oddity I love! It's an article about shark poop:
"Here is a lede to recall and recoil, 'It is as thick as your arm, gungy, and smells disgusting,' and which describes exactly what one is likely to first fear. Which is a giant, well …. a giant turd is what it is."
Also, I love it whenever the Tracker refers to the BBC as the Beeb. Makes me laugh every time.
Alley Cats
Behind the post office in an alley between Walnut and Pearl Streets in downtown Boulder, an eight-foot tall cat playing a violin grins down on several trash and recycling bins. She rests her welded steel high-heeled shoe –a blue blossom on the toe – on a violin case etched with “Smock ’94.” Not visible from 14th or 15th Streets, Kristine Smock’s sculpture, “Alley Cats,” looks over today’s catch – an overstuffed leather chair and a milk crate – like the patron saint of dumpster divers.
“I do a lot of dumpster diving, looking around for things people have thrown out,” Smock, age 58, says. This artist finds her materials in garage sales, recycling centers, antique stores, and unexpected gifts.
“I had a friend who had an old farm, and he let me dig up the fields,” says Smock. But in the more than twenty years she’s been making art out of trash, she’s found the landscape has changed. “It’s harder to find. People have had their stuff cleaned up.”
Today, after finishing a post-workout lunch of a fried egg, Smock will be painting. Instead of a canvas, she’ll be using old boards.
Holding a fly swatter aloft, Smock stalks after the buzzing insect. “My mother taught me how to recycle as a child. She was a recycling queen,” Smock says. “And it just kind of went into my art.”
A matter of economy
As soon as humans starting making trash, they started making art from it.
“There’s a huge tradition in folk art to basically make art out of whatever is available,” says Richard Saxton, assistant professor of art and art history at the University of Colorado. “And oftentimes whatever is available happens to be trash that nobody else wants.”
“It’s a matter of economy that artists tend to use salvaged trash as a material,” Saxton says.
Smock can confirm this. When she first started scavenging for materials, she says, “part of the reason is probably because I was poor.” But it was more than a simple matter of economy: it was a matter of vision. Smock would look at piles of scrap metal and see, “something that looked like a head or an arm.”
And Libby James looks at spent tea bags and sees faces and landscapes.
Reading tea leaves
James lives in Fort Collins. The two weeks she just spent as an election judge – she leans in as if telling a scandalous detail – afforded her plenty of time to work on her cards, “once filled with tea, now filled with love.”
“People see things in them,” James says. The best part is everyone sees something different.
A writer and talented runner (at 72 her kids still can’t keep up), James says, “I have no artistic ability – I don’t!” Instead, emptying tea bags and creating cards is meditative and therapeutic. “Sometimes I draw,” – flowers and vines snaking through the brown tea stains – “and sometimes I just let things happen,” she says.
James is in her third year of retirement. She previously worked in Cheyenne, Wyo. helping young single parents learn job skills and prepare for the GED. She got the idea to use teabags as a material when a friend sent her a card from a village in Africa.
“I saved it, framed it, and thought, gosh, I could do that. Then they started evolving,” says James.
It’s not surprising her inspiration came from another continent. “You’ll find some of the best examples of recycled art from developing countries,” said Saxton. It’s what happens when creativity meets resourcefulness. “African toys built out of recycled pop cans. Also folk art in the US, from homemade yard signs to roadside attractions.”
James first started using her own tea bags – round ones, square ones, whatever she had on hand. Then friends from her writers’ group and book club started saving them. “Now I have a lifetime supply,” she says.
As for the tea itself? “That goes in my compost,” says James. It will eventually disappear into her garden.
James has a philosophy that all things – like tea, which once brewed looses its essence – are temporary. “All of these cards are going to get thrown away,” she says, one way or another.
The knowledge of her art’s transience is liberating.
Art not just for art’s sake
Using found object as art has come a long way since Marcel Duchamp placed a urinal in a gallery with the title, “Fountain.”
The ability of artists to rethink every day objects – like tea bags, or aluminum cans, or old carpet – and redefine what it means for something to be “used up” is translating into the manufacturing world.
“We’re rethinking how we make things,” says Saxton. “Creative people in the arts have inspired change.” Saxton sees this most clearly in architecture and design.
“There’s a lot of experimentation going on in architecture with cast off materials,” says Saxton. “You can bale anything. And anything you can bale, you can build out of.”
But while some artists are using recycled materials because they are functional, inexpensive and sustainable, others use them to convey a message of environmental activism. Lynne Hull of Fort Collins builds sculptures that are visually arresting – combining aged, twisted snags with recycled boards and metals – to create habitat for migrating birds. Chris Jordan of Seattle digitally stitches together photographs of consumer items – cell phones, plastic bottles, computer motherboards – to show the immensity of consumption.
Looks like trash
When Smock gave directions to her home in Lyons, she described a beige two-story house, as if it would be otherwise indiscernible from every house on the block.
She didn’t mention the purple and orange door with a hand painted yellow doorframe. Or the green, blue and orange bowling balls mounted atop steel rebar like a Technicolor, candy-coated version Vlad the Impaler’s yard. Or the plywood apple, large enough to sled on, mounted in a tree. Or the limp piece of galvanized rubber, once inflated though it’s not clear as what, hanging from a branch.
In recent years, Smock has scaled back her use of trash. In part, it’s because welding is hard on the hands, and Smock has taken up the mandolin.
“I still want to do projects about garbage – I love it,” Smock says. “I like the idea of transformation. You take something that no one wants or they find ugly and you turn it into an other, maybe even some beautiful.”
Smock has transformed a rusted bike chain into the spine of a horse, barbed wire into a bird’s nest, silverware and scissors into a human figure, and plastic bottles into a cloud. She has also made a series of concrete masks.
For several years, her art was part of the Sculpture Trail in Lyons, although that project has been cancelled due to lack of funding. She has public installations – murals and sculptures – in Boulder, Denver, and her home state of New Jersey.
“That about wraps it up. That’s my career,” she laughs. “And some of them are deteriorating.”
Smock’s house is full of her own work – painted cabinets in the kitchen with music notes lacquered on, a single wire bent into a female figure, a type of three-dimensional sketch – and gifts from artist friends.
Some of Smock’s pieces carry a blatant environmental message – like the Statue of Liberty she made representing forms of renewable energy – but ultimately, that isn’t what motivates Smock or carries her through the inevitable criticism.
“Some people said ‘that looks like trash.’ But that’s not the majority,” she says. “A lot of people liked it, especially kids. If kids like it, you know it’s successful.”
Viewing the artwork of Kristine Smock and Libby James in Boulder:
You can find Kristine Smock’s sculptures between 14th and 15th Street on Lawry Lane and at the main branch of the Boulder Public Library outside the children’s museum.
Libby James’ cards are for sale at Art Mart (1222 Pearl Street).
Some pollution news that blew up this week. Timely, because on Friday I was lucky enough to hear Sasha Madronich, air pollution in mega-cities expert, speak at the International Environmental Journalism Summit that CU hosted. He did an intensive case-study of Mexico City that included flyovers, weather balloons, and all sorts of crazy sensing techniques.
Local News | Man's body found in Idaho bale of waste paper | Seattle Times Newspaper
Another link from my dad. This one is right up my bale, er, alley.
The quote from the waste station worker at the end makes it sound like this rarely happens, but I have actually seen a bunch of stories about this. It is probably more common than he makes it seem...
Europe Relaxes Rules on Sale of Ugly Fruits and Vegetables - NYTimes.com
Chandler sent me this one. I think this is hilarious. I also think ugly fruit can be delicious and fun to eat (it's more interactive).
From the article:
“This marks a new dawn for the curvy cucumber and the knobbly carrot,” said Mariann Fischer Boel, European commissioner for agriculture, who argued that regulations were better left to market operators.
New conference format: The unsummit (Scripting News)
Sent to me by my dad, in honor of the International Environmental Journalism Summit the CEJ is hosting here at the University of Colorado.
I guess I have almost zero conscious connotations for the word summit (good or bad) in the context of a conference. I only think about it in terms of mountains and peaks. So, not much too this rant, in my opinion (except for the "submit" part at the end).
Crazy picture (finalist for National Geographic's photograph of the year)
Now...whoever can tell me who is eating whom gets a cookie!
My years with Roald. Felicity Dahl talks to Elizabeth Day | Books | The Observer
Interview with Roald Dahl's widow:
"It is a tale that encapsulates much of what makes Dahl's legacy so lasting: his ability to see things from a child's perspective and to transform the ordinary into something unexpectedly enchanting. It was about remembering to look down when all the other adults were looking up."
Also, he did all of his writing from a "writing hut" that sounds kinda awesome...
Changing the way we do news (Scripting News)
Suggested by my dad, and for once I'm actually really glad he pointed me to a site. (Just kidding! Dad, your suggestions are always great.)
And to embarrass my dad even more, here's what he had to say:
He is arguably the "inventor" of blogging. He's a "techie" but one of the topics he likes to talk about is how the internet is "amateurizing" journalism and that that is probably a good thing.
The Party's Over by Zina Saunders | Photo book preview
See a book preview of The Party's Over by Zina Saunders, authored by Zina Saunders
The New Yorker - A Reporter at Large: Suffering Souls
"The search for the roots of psychopathy."
To be honest, I haven't finished reading this piece yet -- but I'm bookmarking it because I'm ABOUT to read and I really want to get this Diigo daily auto blog post to work. (Gah!)
