Syracuse

Two weeks ago I went to Syracuse in New York with Dad to see the gravestones of Grandpa Iber, Great-Grandpa, and Great-Great-Grandpa. We left Grandpa some gummy candies, which he always liked.

Squirrel diets, West Coast vs. Midwest

Seen today in Hyde Park: a squirrel eating a lollipop. Had to zoom in pretty far to get it, so it's blurry.

By contrast, behind our house in Berkeley now there's a pear tree that produces tiny pears that the birds and squirrels like to eat.

Oh you California squirrels and your health food!

The Point

I'm back in Chicago for autumn quarter. Yesterday I walked out to The Point...it was probably the clearest day I've seen in my four-plus years of living here.

The water was beautifully clear too, but it's at the lowest level I've seen in since I moved here. I wonder if this is a cyclical or a secular trend.

"Cave" paintings at Malinalco

Lerdo de Tejada

This mural was painted by the son (he's known as "Vlady") of one of the characters in my dissertation, Victor Serge.

Mexico update

Nicole can tell you all about what we did when she was here in Mexico, complete with photos, here here, and here. It remains to me only to add a few photos.

Torre Latinoamericana II

It was hard to find appealing photos from the sky, but I liked this roof.

Torre Latinoamericana

Today is Nicole and my first anniversary! So we set about finding something nice to do. Alas, being Monday, almost all museums in Mexico City are closed - and anyway, we've seen most of the not-obscure ones and some of the obscure ones. But one thing we had not done was to take the elevator to the top of the Torre Latinoamericana, completed in 1956 and while under construction a towering symbol of Mexican modernity. Forty-three floors up, it is easy to grasp something which is in fact already easy to grasp: this city is enormous. This is the view to the west, including the Torre Mayor, Chapultepec, Polanco, etc.

Zion National Park III

Golden columbine growing from the seeping porous rock walls.

Zion National Park II

Zion National Park I

Well, I've just gone and driven across my rather large country of residence and the natural highlight of this trip had to be Zion National Park in Southwestern Utah. It's a valley carved out over millions of years by the amusingly small Virgin "River." Up at the end of the valley you can trek up the "narrows", hours of hiking through the water that gets deeper and deeper and narrower and narrower until at some point (which we did not reach) you can place a hand on either side of the canyon wall. Or you are under water. While we didn't make it that far, we did make it far enough to see some praiseworthy interplay of light and rock - far better, anyway, than the "light rock" one hears on the radio. Viz.:

Ford Foundation

The Ford Foundation headquarters is a true architectural masterpiece. The offices are all exposed to a 12-story skylit atrium and winter garden, which is a beautiful and ostentatiously inefficient use of space. (Some photos and architectural history here.)

The centerpiece of the garden is a bonsai tree in the center of a coin pond. The tree symbolically places wisdom at the center of its building and the goal of the Foundation philanthropic activity. (Although with that reading the coin pool suggests the futility of throwing money after wisdom. Perhaps that's overthinkng things a bit.)

But to my mind, the most remarkable thing about the space, other than that it makes a cathedral of nature, is that in its midtown Manhattan setting, it inverts the traditional relationship between nature and built space. In Manhattan, architecture has displaced landscape as the manner of beautifying the space that humans occupy. The Ford Foundation building brings the landscape to the inside, which serves all the more to reveal the brick jungle on the other side of the windows.

United Nations

I'm working at the archives Ford Foundation this week, and their building is just down the block from the United Nations headquarters in New York.

I liked this sculpture but I would want to point out to anyone thinking about firing this gun that it will blow up in your face. Which, I suppose, is exactly the point.

Mathiessen State Park

The worst thing about living in Chicago, which is otherwise pretty great, is that to get yourself to any sort of natural environment you have to go far. (There are of course many city parks, the lakefront, the forest preserves, the botanic garden, etc., all of which add immeasurably to one's quality of life around here. But it's not the same as being away from it all. Nor are the Indiana Dunes, with their nuclear-power-plant views. And, let's face it, farmland is as "unnatural" an environment as a city.) Most Chicagoans go to Starved Rock State Park, about 1.6 hours away in Utica, Illinois. And indeed, Starved Rock is a nice place to be. But it's too bad that people skip over Matthiessen State Park, just a couple of miles past the entrance to Starved Rock. For one thing, there are often fewer people at Matthiessen. At the Dells Area, there are waterfalls and you can go walking around in the river: it's arguably more pleasant than the sandstone bowls at Starved Rock. We recently went to the River Area for the first time, and found wild orchids. If you've already been to Starved Rock a couple of times, try Matthiessen the next time you go.

Gazing Globe - Spring

Got out today to do the final season of Chicago gazing globes - spring. This was the most spring-like and most appealing picture. But although it's more abstract, I also liked this one of the globe sitting on a log:

Kayaking on Lake Michigan

It seemed warm enough today to go kayaking, so we went out on Lake Michigan. For the first 3/4 of the trip, it was great - then the sun disappeared, the wind kicked up, and we got cold. Still, Chicago looked great.

See, it was fun!

Detroit Institute of Arts II

The other great exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts was a real surprise - a collection of chess boards from across the centuries and the regions of the earth. As Nicole pointed out, most often at art museums you see objects organized by era, region, and type: Victorian plates here, Dutch masters there, etc. Rarely does an exhibition feature a single object as interpreted by many different movements, as these extraordinary chess sets did. It struck me that it would be a great way to teach art history to introduce a new current or school by showing how it interpreted a chess set: whether Islamic non-figurative art or surrealism through Dali's finger-board. I'm showing at right one of the pawns from an 18th century Italian all-insect set. I highly recommended you look at the pictures here and here (the latter in pdf form). The capitalists vs. communists set from Leningrad in 1925 is extraordinary, though nothing if not unsubtle.

Detroit Institute of Arts

We've spent a few days in Ann Arbor, hosted by some generous friends, but we struck out one day for Detroit and its Institute of Arts. It's fascinating because the whole Institute would probably not have existed had Detroit not once been the fourth largest city in the U.S. 50-60 years ago. I thought it was a great museum -- large enough to hold many things of interest, but not so large that it couldn't be taken in within a single day. A couple of parts were worth the price of admission by themselves. The museum's most famous work are the Detroit Industry Murals, painted by Diego Rivera in 1932 and 1933. For a Communist (and Trotskyist, etc.), Rivera was orthodox enough to remember that it was the industrial proletariat that will bring about the socialist revolution, and so he celebrated the creation of industry and even of industrialists. There are, in his madman's mind, also currents of horror at the workings of technology, which he strongly associated with the United States (as against Mexico, which he associated with the workings of nature).

See also his occasional wife Frida Kahlo's not-unambiguous interpretation of the divide between "natural" Mexico and "industrial" America:

Spring Break!

In Michigan this year, where everyone is enjoying the balmy temperatures.

Inauguration - White House

After the end of the inauguration, I tried to get closer to the Capitol, where some friends were waiting. I tried for an hour and couldn't find any way to go in that direction. I suppose for security reasons, all of the crowds were being moved in the opposite direction. And so I passed by the White House.

It's ours now!

Inauguration - Monument

Inauguration - Monument

There I am! The temperature wasn't too low but it was below freezing and we all ended up standing out there for about six hours straight.

Inauguration - Crowd

Here's a little shot of the crowd, which of course was impossible to capture in a picture. In the center of the photo, you can make out a row of portable toilets that lots of folks decided represented their best hope of seeing something. They climbed on top to get a view, and, as far as I know, there were no disasters.

Inauguration - Capitol

This is as close as I got on the day of the event. Between me and the Capitol Building there was a solid mass of people. I'm standing very close to the Washington Monument.

Inauguration - Capitol

I was in Washington DC the last two weeks working at the archives -- which happened to coincide with the inauguration of a certain new president. Here's a picture of the capitol building on January 19th, the day before - that is far far closer than I would get on inauguration day itself.

Gazing globe 3 seasons

I've got three seasons of gazing globe pictures now from the same rotting log in Jackson Park. Out of context of the other pictures we took on those days fall and summer look pretty similar, but there's a kind of brightness and warmth in the summer photo that comes through nicely. (Particularly on a day like today, when we took the winter photo!) This project is basically turning into an ode to temperate climates. And Hyde Park.

Summer

Fall

Winter

November 4, continued

There were a quarter million people downtown celebrating on November 4, but I made it into the paper! Well, sort of: my friend Sarah found a picture of me in the user-submitted section of the Chicago Tribune's online coverage. Currently it's photo number 14 in the list that you can find by following the link here. Nicole is there, but only her forehead seems to have made the picture. The picture was submitted by a user named tonywint. Thanks tonywint, and thanks to Sarah for finding it.

November 4

So many things to say...it was simply the best day in American politics in my lifetime. We were fortune enough to get some of the free tickets to be there in Grant Park for the Obama victory celebration. However, as you can see from this picture, there were many many people there. We were in the large crowd off to the top right, and couldn't even see the stage. All we could see was the jumbotron broadcasting the results and the speeches.

When the West Coast polls closed CNN called the election for Obama and the place erupted. We were all cheering, hugging each other, crying...it was an incredible surge of emotion. I'm sure that with time we'll forget what this was like, and how momentous it seemed. Just for a moment, we could let go of our guilt. And in the days that have followed, I have felt that there is someone in charge who believes that it is important to take care of the future: my future, our future. Of course things like this can't be quantified, but I feel that maybe 15-20% of the unhappiness that I've felt over the last eight years can be attributed to the political direction that the country had taken and the lack of action on things that matter. Now I feel no bitterness towards Bush, just relief.

Just as it was hard to see, it was hard to get a picture of anything down there. There's a hat in the way here, but if you enlarge the picture you'll be able to see the crowd and get a sense of the scope of things. Obama has finished his speech here and you can see him with his family on the screen in the upper left.

Finally, you owe it to yourself to look at this sequence of photos, taken at a rally in Virginia. Hope indeed. Update: the original photographer has come forward: she's a 17-year-old named Nida Vidutis, and her site is here.

Gazing Globe I

I had an idea for what a younger kid might call an "art project" over the summer. Since we got a phenomenal camera as a wedding gift (thanks Auntie Di & Uncle Garth) and since Nicole decided my idea was worth pursuing and bought me the globe (thanks Nicole), this is the first of a series.

Amtrak

I spent last week in New York doing research, and I decided to take the train out from Chicago to get there. It was a 21 hour trip, which I decided to undergo to see our nation's rail network for myself. It was a worthwhile experience, involving some uncomfortable sleeping, an immigration raid that nabbed the woman sitting behind me, and some beautiful scenery (seen here) in upstate New York (Chicago to New York runs through Albany, and then south).

Here's what I liked: the cars were plenty modern, with lots more space than you would have on an airplane. They had footrests, you can obviously walk around the cars, and the seats recline well enough to sleep. If you were a couple and had seats next to each other, you could make a comfortable evening of it. There were two electrical outlets in each seat, so you could theoretically get some work done. Security was much less onerous than an airport, and it felt safe rather than threatening. It was cheaper than flying. The conductors were less stressed than flight attendants.

The problems are as follows: the train ride is not quite smooth enough to allow me to work efficiently, so I got to feeling a bit sick as I tried to write on my laptop. That's not good for a really long trip. There was far too much air conditioning, making it quite uncomfortable. When you can't quite stretch out to sleep, your feet fall asleep and wake you up. For too many long stretches, the train just sits there, not moving at all. It never seemed to go faster than 80 miles an hour.

Would I do it again? I've thought about it, and I'm still not sure. I felt that I could do it again right after I arrived, but I came down with cold symptoms for the two days that followed. I blame the frigid air I had blowing on me for 21 straight hours. If I could take away that problem, I'd think about it, but most people wouldn't and I wouldn't blame them either. To really begin to reduce flying and make it easier to reduce our impact on the environment, you need some functional long-haul service that's quite a bit faster. I used to think the United States was just to big to make that work, but I was convinced by this experience that that a really good rail network would work better than I had thought. Obviously there are some distances over which trains are faster than planes when you add in all of the time in airports. And train depots are generally more central to cities than airports, so that's another advantage. But even for long-haul, I think there's an opportunity that's being missed. Chicago to New York, for example, is about 800 miles, 1000 along the route through Albany that we took. If we had a serious rail network, you can easily have consistent speeds of 100 miles an hour. You could, like I did, begin at night, and go to sleep. I woke up in Buffalo and had to wait another 12 hours before hitting New York City. But if the trains had dedicated fast track, 100-120 miles isn't even particularly speedy by international standards. And you could put people to bed on long haul routes, and wake them up at their destination. Ten hours on a comfortable train designed for sleeping wouldn't be such a bad way to travel, and might not be such a bad trade with five hours of painful flying. Maybe someday.

On September 11, a picture of New York from the 10th story of the New York University main library, where I am doing some work right now.

Mantis

Noticed this mantis outside the other day. Kevin Drum blogs a picture of his cats every Friday...I'm thinking about starting Saturday mantisblogging. If I can find any more, that is. Which is unlikely.

Springfield Trip

Nicole and I and two friends drove down to capitol of the great state of Illinois on Saturday. Here's a picture of the Old Capitol Building, where Lincoln gave his "House Divided" speech. It turns out there were about 25,000 other people there that day too. Here's a picture of the Old Capitol.

And here's a hint of why we were there.

Infrastructure in Paris

I think that some Americans assume that Europeans have some kind of inherently superior way of living, and Americans are sort of inexplicably barbarous. I think that this is not right, and that what barbarism exists in the United States is perfectly explicable. Take for example this wonderful system of public bicycles that exists in Paris, although we weren't able to take advantage of it because we needed a special chip in our credit cards that we didn't have. For 29 euros a year, you can rent a bicycle at any one of these stations distributed throughout the city, every few blocks in the denser parts of town. So long as you return the bicycle within a short time (30 or 45 minutes, I can't quite remember), there's no additional charge. The longer you keep the bicycle, the longer you accrue additional costs, designed to increase exponentially to keep the bikes in circulation. Lots of people use this system to get around, and of course there is a fine metro system, and a good higher speed rail system. The investment in public infrastructure is remarkable by American standards.

And yet: people in Paris still drive a lot. They drive smaller cars, generally, that fit better on the streets. There are more scooter/Vespa type vehicles, mini-cars, and the like. All of these, naturally, get better gas mileage than the generally larger fleet we have in the United States. And guess what? Since the price of gas has risen in the United States, people have been looking to downsize their cars. Even still, because of taxes, gas in Europe costs twice as much as it does in the United States, and has for a long time. This has resulted in a better balance between cars, trains, bicycles...the full range of transportation options. And the United States is responding in similar ways to Europeans to similar inputs. Indeed, Washington DC has introduced such a system, and Matthew Yglesias, as usual, has some good suggestions about how to make it really work. I would only add that there are two reasons why biking is safer in Paris than in a US city, and it's not simply that Parisian drivers are more accustomed to sharing the road (although that's part of it). It's also that, in between parking spaces and sidewalks, there are curb-separated spaces designated exclusively for bikers, particularly along major boulevards. Also, driving speeds struck me as somewhat lower overall, so where bicycles are sharing the road, the chance of an accident, particularly a fatal one, are somewhat lower. We need to move in that direction, and I think there's reason to believe that, responding to the higher price of energy, we will.

Well that sort of speaks for itself!

Photo credit: Uncle Garth

Library

So, I had to go to this library (named after former President Francois Mitterand) to get an ID card to go to an archive that interested me. There are four towers (you see two in the picture, there are two more behind me) that are L-shaped and supposed to look a bit like open books.


It's a nice facility, to be sure, and a pleasant, modern part of Paris. But you have to pay to use the library. The more days you want to use it, the more you have to pay. I believe that this is deeply wrong. This is the national library of the country.

More about what is right and what is wrong with France in a future post.

Paris

It has been a busy month what with getting married and all, but I still don't have any pictures of that day's events. I was otherwise occupied.

Nicole and I are now in Paris, and I'm doing some work at the archives of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. UNESCO headquarters are found at the opposite end of the old fairgrounds (and behind the Ecole Militaire) from the Eiffel Tower. Here you can see the UNESCO globe and the Eiffel Tower in the background.

Iowa floods

Everyone I know in Iowa is doing fine and no one's house should be flooded. That said, if I still lived where I lived from grades 2 through 6, I'd pretty much be under water. Most of the route that I used to take to elementary school is a river. University of Iowa buildings where I used to work are being extensively sandbagged in anticipation of the rising waters. This is being spoken about as a 500-year flood.

See Iowa City's Press Citizen newspaper and the Des Moines Register for photos.

Best wishes to everyone in Iowa for a quick end to the flooding and a productive recovery.

Happy a few days after International Workers' Day

The University of Chicago's economics department is famous for its conservatism, especially in the era when Milton Friedman was its most notorious member. In those days the economics department was housed in Pick Hall (they've now moved across the Midway), seen in the background here. There's a sculpture in front of Pick Hall, by Italian artist Virginio Ferrari, that at first seems merely to be an abstract installation. But legend has it that on May Day, at noon, the sculpture casts on the ground the symbol of international Communism, the hammer and sickle, as if to taunt the free marketers inside the building. The artists says he didn't intend for this to happen, but you can be the judge. I took this picture around 11:00 on May Day. At the link below you can see what it would have looked like at noon.



Hat tip to Chicago Public Radio.

Epiphyte Club

From the United States Botanic Garden, the root system of an epiphyte that I thought would look interesting. I have a widescreen laptop so I took it with those proportions.

Rivane Neuenschwander, three times fast

I went to DC's modern art museum this weekend, and I particularly liked a video installation by the Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander. You can see a description of it here. I wonder if she (and her collaborator) had to cover the confetti in honey or something to get the ants to clean up our human mess.

There's some more of her art here and here. The latter one is quite interesting because it's owned by MoMA; MoMA's director for many years was Nelson Rockefeller, who was also the head of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs during World War II, which sent Walt Disney to Brazil on goodwill tours during the war, which led to the creation of the Ze Carioca character, which Rivane's work criticizes/satirizes/comments on.

Spring means capital fun

God made two things inherently beautiful, and I think I know why: flowers, to be attractive to bees, and derelict buildings in rural settings, to be attractive to looters. These are probably the easiest things to photograph in the world. The degree of difficulty is very low, though. It's very hard to do something surprising in those settings.

Thus most flower and derelict building photographs are mediocre. Nothing wrong with that: mediocre art is pretty, and pleasing for being so. But good art succeeds in showing us something in a new way, in getting us to see the familiar as something strange. That's why I'm not a good photographer yet, just a mediocre one. That's OK - I'm still thinking about how to get better. And if photography is my medium--and it has to be, since I can't draw or paint my way out of a Cubist-themed dance party--it's not going to be an easy one. "Photorealism" is inherent to the genre and to the technology, so it makes it challenging to produce something good, at least using the definitions laid out above. (Think about it: some of the best photographs you've ever seen use blurring or double-imagery or some other camera trick, pushing aside photorealism in favor of something genuinely illuminating.) Some of Nicole's best pictures, using light or lines in an unexpected way, achieve this. I'm still working on it.

But hey, it's springtime and I'm in Washington DC for two weeks of research! The bees have sprung fully formed from the ether, the cherry blossoms are falling to the ground, and open windows allow us to be irritated by our neighbors' behavior in ways that we had forgotten we could be over the long winter. Few things I like more, at such a juncture, than a walk in the woods, in this case DC's Whitehaven Parkway, near Georgetown University. The result: mediocre photographs. Sorry.


PS: There's another way to take good photographs, namely, to take them of people. Human beings are often quite interesting when frozen in time. But I don't have the social fortitude to do that. So I'll have to think of something else.

PPS: I didn't mean it about God; I meant the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

PPPS: I did try to take "good" pictures. I found these mushrooms on a log. The result is maybe mediocre+.


PPPPS: I went out twice today, and got rained on twice. It's been sunny the rest of the day. What does this mean? God didn't like my Flying Spaghetti Monster joke? But I hadn't even made it yet...but it's God...maybe he knew I'd make it.

PPPPPS: Maybe the Flying Spaghetti Monster didn't like my God reference in line 1, and that's why I got rained on.