Skullptures

Here are a couple sculpture doodles I did this week:

Mushrooms to the Rescue

A Wall... of MOSS

The Moss Room, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, is a restaurant with a 28-foot tall wall of moss. I am down with all of this.

Miniature Midtown Manhattan

This is badass.



2000 hours is a full-time job for a year, and he did it in 6 months.

National Geographic - Soil

National Geographic's Featured Article for September on Soil: Our Good Earth, by Charles C. Mann,

Journalists sometimes describe unsexy subjects as MEGO: My eyes glaze over. Alas, soil degradation is the essence of MEGO. Nonetheless, the stakes—and the opportunities—could hardly be higher, says Rattan Lal, a prominent soil scientist at Ohio State University. Researchers and ordinary farmers around the world are finding that even devastated soils can be restored. The payoff, Lal says, is the chance not only to fight hunger but also to attack problems like water scarcity and even global warming. Indeed, some researchers believe that global warming can be slowed significantly by using vast stores of carbon to reengineer the world's bad soils. "Political stability, environmental quality, hunger, and poverty all have the same root," Lal says. "In the long run, the solution to each is restoring the most basic of all resources, the soil."

More New Ink

Some abstract hatched drawings.

Documentaries I Wouldn't Pay To See*

The Capital Group Sierra Club is presenting a series of films on Transit. I don't know why either.

Their next film is called Taken For A Ride, and is a 1996 documentary about how the streetcar industry was dismantled by sinister and greedy automobile and petroleum companies.

From what I've gathered, the film's theory is that a very young General Motors figured people would give up on public transportation and buy more of these new things called automobiles if the heaven-on-earth that was the electric streetcar was replaced by smelly, bouncy, slow-moving buses (made by GM.)

Perhaps the next film in the series will deal with how the evil streetcar megacorporations plotted with the Big Coal power industry to railroad majestic horse transportation out of existence...

Or how greedy equine ranching monopolies jockeyed for the top spot at the expense of pure and honest pedestrian mobility...

We should all be flagellated. Locomotion indeed. Ok I'll stop.

Anyway, here's the Great American Streetcar Scandal wikipedia page.

(*because they're free. Also, I'll be out of town, going on a trip, in a car.)

Robert Pogue Harrison

From Artforum:

Gardening, like art, can counter the frenzy of our age, which is characterized by an aggravated consumerism that entails as its necessary correlate endless production and endless productivity. The daily turbulence that today’s capitalist economy requires militates against the sanctuaries of repose that I discuss throughout the book, of which gardens are typically a figure. My last chapter is titled “The Paradox of the Age.” The paradox is that, while the system is in a complete frenzy, what seems to be driving it is a desire to re-create a passive Edenic condition in which all the fruits of the earth will be provided for without care, labor, or pain—as if we could be consumer enjoyers of endless bounty. But the stories and myths that have come down to us through the ages, and which I treat in my book, tell us that the true source of human happiness is not consumption but cultivation, is not passive gratification but the assumption of active responsibility.

Duty-free Prices

Fascinating article about interactions between economic and ethical motivators. [via]

To explore the interaction of moral sentiments and self-interest, Bowles begins with a case where six day care centers in Haifa, Israel imposed a fine on parents who picked their kids up late. The fine aimed to encourage parents to be more prompt. Instead, parents reacted to the fine by coming even later. Why? According to Bowles: "The fine seems to have undermined the parents' sense of ethical obligation to avoid inconveniencing the teachers and led them to think of lateness as just another commodity they could purchase."

New Ink