My new hero. Probably yours, too.
Friday, August 18, 2006
Saturday, August 12, 2006
Baby the Corpse Flower Bloom Day
August 10th was "Baby the Corpse Flower Bloom Day", in case you missed it.
The Brooklyn Botanical Garden has a Corpse Flower, so named because it smells like a rotting corpse. People in Sumatra, where it grows, used to beat it up because they thought it would eat them. Which makes sense. You can smell them from half a mile away and they are as big as a person. Plus they're phallic. And sweaty. Victorian ladies were not allowed to see them. But people are lining up to do so because, did I forget to say, it's the biggest flower in the world. And it's blooming now, live, on the web.
The Brooklyn Botanical Garden has a Corpse Flower, so named because it smells like a rotting corpse. People in Sumatra, where it grows, used to beat it up because they thought it would eat them. Which makes sense. You can smell them from half a mile away and they are as big as a person. Plus they're phallic. And sweaty. Victorian ladies were not allowed to see them. But people are lining up to do so because, did I forget to say, it's the biggest flower in the world. And it's blooming now, live, on the web.
Friday, August 11, 2006
Eat your Weeds
I had intended to make this blog focus almost exclusively on art, but I'm in the middle of a very large complicated drawing that won't be done for a while and now I've got a new off-topic obsession that I can't begin to resist. Here it is.
It's a weed. But it's so much more.
Here's the deal. A few years ago I took up gardening on the roof deck behind my studio so that I would have references for all the botanical patterns in my paintings. I discovered that I'm pretty good gardener, if you can count the kind of people who water weeds just to see how they turn out good gardeners.
I've made some great discoveries that way, though. Pokeweed, one of my first exciting weeds, has hot pink stems, lime green leaves and strings of long purple berries that I've been told get birds drunk. My first pokeweed plant was a symmetrical marvel of a waterfall of pink and purple- it was gorgeous, and birds did seem to love it. (Pokeweed is also extremely poisonous to people, although Southerners eat it after subjecting it to a careful washing process that involves disposing of the water it's boiled in a number of times.)
This badger is holding some pokeweed. In fact this image is a detail of a larger piece called Pokeweed Allegory (Grip and the Nevermore Raven With Respective Badgers).
Not all my weed experiments turn out so well. I was fascinated by a tall dramatic plant that grew straight up to the sky out of one of my flower pots a couple years ago. It got about four feet high, and when it was the least bit thirsty it would droop over as if it was about to die that very minute. I watered it tenderly until it bloomed into a vicious shoot of ragweed which has now seeded itself in every pot I own.
But this weed- the one in the picture above- this is a Weed of Redemption. It's a Weed of the Gods, and it grows wild all over Philadelphia. Purslane.
It's an herb, it's a vegetable, it's been eaten by ancient Egyptians, Greeks (who called it food of the gods), and it's still common in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Cooking. It has huge amounts of Omega-3 fatty acids and lowers cholesterol and high blood pressure and is a general anti-inflammatory. Ancient people thought it was good for the frenzy. (My more reasonable medical claims come absolutely unverified, from this web page, and this one, too, which I choose to believe). It can be eaten in salads or soups or under fish or chicken. It's a Mexican comfort food.
And it's in the cracks between the sidewalks.
Of course I tasted it. After looking at a billion pictures of it on the internet, of course, and being very sure I wasn't about to poison myself.
It's really delicious. Not just edible- delicious. There are good pictures of purslane here, and another, better article about purslane here. There are also some recipes here. I also found some in the Gourmet cookbook, and Saveur had a great looking potato salad that uses it too. Go grab yourself a salad off the sidewalk- it's purslane, the Philadelphia free food weed.
It's a weed. But it's so much more.
Here's the deal. A few years ago I took up gardening on the roof deck behind my studio so that I would have references for all the botanical patterns in my paintings. I discovered that I'm pretty good gardener, if you can count the kind of people who water weeds just to see how they turn out good gardeners.
I've made some great discoveries that way, though. Pokeweed, one of my first exciting weeds, has hot pink stems, lime green leaves and strings of long purple berries that I've been told get birds drunk. My first pokeweed plant was a symmetrical marvel of a waterfall of pink and purple- it was gorgeous, and birds did seem to love it. (Pokeweed is also extremely poisonous to people, although Southerners eat it after subjecting it to a careful washing process that involves disposing of the water it's boiled in a number of times.)
This badger is holding some pokeweed. In fact this image is a detail of a larger piece called Pokeweed Allegory (Grip and the Nevermore Raven With Respective Badgers).
Not all my weed experiments turn out so well. I was fascinated by a tall dramatic plant that grew straight up to the sky out of one of my flower pots a couple years ago. It got about four feet high, and when it was the least bit thirsty it would droop over as if it was about to die that very minute. I watered it tenderly until it bloomed into a vicious shoot of ragweed which has now seeded itself in every pot I own.
But this weed- the one in the picture above- this is a Weed of Redemption. It's a Weed of the Gods, and it grows wild all over Philadelphia. Purslane.
It's an herb, it's a vegetable, it's been eaten by ancient Egyptians, Greeks (who called it food of the gods), and it's still common in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Cooking. It has huge amounts of Omega-3 fatty acids and lowers cholesterol and high blood pressure and is a general anti-inflammatory. Ancient people thought it was good for the frenzy. (My more reasonable medical claims come absolutely unverified, from this web page, and this one, too, which I choose to believe). It can be eaten in salads or soups or under fish or chicken. It's a Mexican comfort food.
And it's in the cracks between the sidewalks.
Of course I tasted it. After looking at a billion pictures of it on the internet, of course, and being very sure I wasn't about to poison myself.
It's really delicious. Not just edible- delicious. There are good pictures of purslane here, and another, better article about purslane here. There are also some recipes here. I also found some in the Gourmet cookbook, and Saveur had a great looking potato salad that uses it too. Go grab yourself a salad off the sidewalk- it's purslane, the Philadelphia free food weed.
Wednesday, August 09, 2006
Ground Control to Manatee Tom
There's a manatee in the Hudson river.
I thought about this today as I looked at a school of fish milling around in the shallows of the Schuylkill river. What would possess a lone manatee to go this far north? Manatees are either kinda dumb or optimistic depending on who you ask. You can swim right up to them and pat them on the nose, although you shouldn't, because this gives them the impression that your whole species consists of people who can be trusted not to run you over with a motorboat.
Was the lone manatee an exceptional individual who bucked the general trend and took off on a voyage of exploration? Did she get lost? We can't know- and we barely bother asking- because we're so used to thinking science has the answer to everything regarding animals that we can't credit them with individual initiative. That's for us. Humans make decisions, but animals have instinct. We can't imagine that Manatee X decided to go North; we imagine he was driven north by some mistake or incentive that we just haven't discovered yet.
Puny humans.
A while ago an article in the New York Times turned me on to Google Trends, a search engine that has been called the "Database of Intentions". The idea is that people search google for things they plan to do in the future- movie show times, hotel rooms- and that the aggregate of this data announces the intentions of the population that searches the database. So if everybody starts searching for, say, "Pirates of the Caribbean 12" we will have ourselves a franchise. It's a marketer's dream, and proposes the possibility that a good reader of search engine data could detect trends in advance of the general population. In advance of you and me. In advance of our conscious minds. They could take a lot of fun out of our lives by knowing, when we decided to go North, that people in general had been thinking about moving north, and that it was probably due to a higher incidence of snow cones.
I don't see how marketing can't account for most of our everyday decisions, and how, when it doesn't, we shouldn't take credit for being fabulously individuated and brave. Like, say, a certain manatee.
Google being google, they have put the database of intentions online. The real fun starts when you compare searches. So you can also see, for instance, if people are searching more often for, say, art or science, (art), good or evil or manatees or sharks(sharks).
Searching reveals intuitive truths. Sharks are way out of manatees' league, but groundhogs, say, come up about even.
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(Groundhogs are red.)
Google knows what you thought you knew. It might have what we used to call intuition: a sense of the aggregate. It's a little depressing to think that all this private information is being codified and expressed commercially, but there is always an opposing force.
The Alamo Draft House in Austin (which is a place already dear to my heart since it serves beer and cheeseburgers at the movie theater) has sponsored a "Blanks on a Blank" movie contest that turns "Snakes on a Plane" into a much better joke than it was already. If my friend Wes Kim's "Aardvarks on a Tank" wins the contest, he will get to go to premiere. And he really, really should be there. It will strike a blow for something. You will agree with me if you watch the movie: he plays the guy with the sandals. Aardvarks on a Tank can be found on this page full of lesser movies.
And if you need more evidence of manatee-like behavior in the human flock, check out Amazon.com's grocery aisle. Search for Tuscan Milk and read the reviews. Go from there to grapes and vine ripened tomatoes. It will make you love the puny humans and their milk drinking ways.
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