Inner Uncertainty

Wright began work at the very moment when American architecture was undermined by the most dangerous reaction since the time of its origin.  The classic and Gothic fashions which in those years overwhelmed the constituent facts of American architecture had, of course, nothing to do with tradition.  They mean nothing more than the giving of an artificial backbone to people who were weak in their emotional structure.  Behind the screens of their houses - miniature Versailles, Tuscan villa, or medieval manor - or their skyscrapers in sacred Gothic shapes, these people could hide their inner uncertainty.  This had its deplorable consequences for the profession of architecture.  The architect who wished to live by his profession had to conform to the vogue or give up.

- Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, p. 425.  

Modern Is Not Contemporary

Tom Blachford

Manhattan Inside the Grand Canyon

Pools at Night

Pools at Night

(Pool Party, 2010 by Jonathan Wateridge. Oil on linen. Courtesy of All Visual Arts/London)

The doorbell sits on a sandstone wall set perpendicular to the front door which is glass and oversized and mounted on a brass pivot and blends with the glass walls on either side of it. A girl I don’t know and who doesn’t say anything but acts friendly answers the door and I follow her through the house to the back where the pool glows sedately under the balmy summer night sky.

Tyrone is sitting on a deck chair on the other side with two girls sitting nearby. The girls are skinny but attractive, well-dressed, good teeth. House music plays from speakers hidden here and there. I can’t see them, but I can hear the sound swell and recede as I walk past them.

The light refracting from the surface of the pool plays on the surface of Trini’s skin in intricate designs like subatomic explosions. The borders always possess the most beauty and beauty is expensive. Houses on the beach or with mountain or ocean views cost something, because they have access to the border areas, the places where two distinct environments come together and interact. And the surface of the pool is one of these. A membrane between two worlds that defines beauty.

From The Heat Death of the Universe, copyright R. White, unpublished.

Gateway - Joe Nix

Gateway 2012 - Teaser from VISUAL ANTHEM on Vimeo.

Regular readers will have a passing familiarity with the work of Joe Nix, my childhood friend (Joe lived with me and my parents for the better part of a year), current friend and fellow Belltowner. Joe has had all kinds of success pursuing art, on canvas and on buildings. In addition to his own art, he runs Vice/Versa Gallery and the monthly Sideshow event in Belltown and in doing so has helped further the careers of other regional artists. Joe sent me this link today. It's a teaser trailer for an upcoming indie documentary about the creation of one of his most compelling projects to date - his mural on a house in Nashville. If it doesn't play smoothly, click the "HD" icon on the lower right and it will play smoothly in low-def.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics

Friday night of this week was the last time the Belltown art walk will be held on a Friday. In fact, we knew before we left the house that it was not even an official art-walk night: as of this month the BAW conformed to the other AW paradigms around town and moved to third Thursdays, becoming in the process the more-broadly-titled Belltown Art Walk and More (BAWM).

So, Joe Nichol hung what was probably his last Friday opening at the Whisky Bar (sp) at Second and Stewart. The artist he chose, as curator of that particular bar's AW night, is a photographer who prints her images on wood panels in such a way that they look, to my eyes, like American photorealist paintings of the late-middle 20th century. Their similar subject matter may be a part of that - they prominently feature human-occupied objects like houses and cars.

Before the Whisky, we had what will almost certainly be our last meal at a favorite restaurant of ours, Txori. Txori has been open for a couple of years and features delicious and aesthetic Basque pintxos. In a little more than a week it will close. The owner was there and talked to us about the closing and her plan to relocate the restaurant, eventually, to Capitol Hill. Its space will be taken over by, remarkably, another pintxos restaurant. "I've been crying for weeks," the owner said, summing up her feelings about the economically-based closing.

In conversation at the Whisky, I brought up the closing of the Fun Forest at the Seattle Center. It is the only amusement park in the city of Seattle and it is certainly dilapidated, having been open for all of the years since the '62 World's Fair and with most of its technology undoubtedly of that vintage. There is a lot of grumpiness among the locals around here regarding the closing, not so much from nostalgia for the amusements, but more out of despair for the change it signals.

The local aristocracy (currently reshaping the whole of the South Lake Union area into a sort of urban-bourgeois playground) has decided that the Fun Forest space would be better suited for that 21st-century moneyed-middle-class version of an amusement ride: another Chihuly (tm) museum (ahem) of glass. This is the kind of thing that gets the working-class artists at the Whisky and the jaded quasi-hipsters at the local eateries a little red in the face and/or green around the gills.

"You'll have to pay to get in," Joe emphasized. "It's just another thing in this city that's only for people with money."

Saturday, we had lunch in West Seattle. The skies were hazy-sunny blue, but there was a cold wind. We hurried back to the city because one of our friends was participating in some kind of public performance-art thing (flash mob), which we knew little about, but which Jaime wanted to see. It was novel and was close to our home, being on the grass below the Space Needle, so it seemed worth the walk.

When we arrived there were already dozens of the apparently dance-inclined milling around and practicing circus arts and engaging in similar activities that you might expect. The dozens soon swelled to over a hundred and after a few minutes the dancing started; the music was broadcast over loudspeakers mounted in the bed of a truck that had pulled up. They danced straight through a medley of four songs in a practiced routine. It ended with all of them frozen in place (what else?) and holding some sort of L-shaped hand sign extended above their heads.

We were talking to another friend, on the sidelines, who is the boyfriend of the guy who was participating. He explained the hand signal and the rest of it. The whole thing was inspired by a current television show, "Glee". Neither of us having seen it before, Jaime and I weren't sure of the significance of any of it.

As we walked home I began to wonder whether it might have all been some sort of guerilla-marketing thing for the television show. I still don't know whether I watched a commercial or a spontaneous showing of sincere fandom.

As we walked home we stopped and tried the "whisper dishes" outside the Pac. Science Center. They rely on principles of sound, reflection and refraction to allow you to whisper to one another over the distance of a hundred feet or so, without the use of any modern technology. They didn't seem to work today - we couldn't hear one another. We blamed it on the wind.

It was still sunny but cold when we got home. As I was looking at some pictures I took, I had a thought and mentioned it to Jaime.

"Did you know the Space Needle is still privately owned?"