REASSURED BY A STUDIO VISIT TO @MUDAUSTRALIA :The fast food villages in the Botanic Gardens during the 10th anniversary of the Vivid Festival in Sydney last year induced in me a panic about environmentally destructive manufactured food & throwaway plates & utensils that’s been steadily intensifying ever since. Placards on the white picket fences surrounding the food villages in the Botanic Gardens reading “NO PLANTS NO FUTURE”, in line with the gardens being a “living lab” grappling with issues of biodiversity to ensure “quality of life for generations to come” seemed wildly contradicted by the high-concept fast food & merchandise being sold in the Gardens & around Circular Quay to the Overseas Passenger Terminal: glow-in-the-dark candy floss, circular potato fries on sticks, light-up plastic crown of thorns headbands. ..
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My inner Wile E. Coyote kicks in when I encounter fast food at festivals. Why couldn’t the ACME Corporation invent some kind of super-strong but lightweight ceramic vessels & utensils to be fed into a solar-powered cleaning & sterilising device the size of a mobile refrigeration unit? But then, being ACME, it would inevitably backfire & begin frisbeeing plates. …
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I visited the MUD factory during the Sydney Design Festival & drank a Gin & Tonic from a reject small beaker mug with the tiniest of cracks in the upper edge. The sublime gin was from the neighbouring distillery @younghenrys. A spring of fresh rosemary & roughly cut slice of cucumber garnished the drink. The brilliant colours & forms of the MUD ceramics render them powerfully instagenic but the studio visit emphasised the quality of the manufacturing process, precise & orderly but at each stage guided by skilled humans rather than the kind of salesmanship that would push trends & sets & seasonal must-haves. ..
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I need to buy some ceramics for everyday dining & the existential panic, the purchasing paralysis induced by so many throwaway plates, has been quelled somewhat by the hope that I might be able to go to a MUD seconds sale & acquire perfectly imperfect plates & bowls & beakers I’ll use over & over & over & never throw away.
IN THE SPIRIT OF JOSIAH WEDGWOOD: The black coffee mug decorated with the Bad Seed embryo drawn by @markryden reminds me of the ‘Jasperware’ crafted by Josiah Wedgwood in the late 18th century that featured characters from Greek and Roman mythology and portraits of personalities of the day. (@mudaustralia beaker on the right)..
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Part of the @statelibrarynsw ’s commemoration of Wedgwood’s grandson Charles Darwin’s visit to Australia in 1836 included various pieces of @wedgwood pottery held in the collection. I imagined Wedgwood / Darwin family gatherings with food served on these myth-studded vessels. With every phenomenal discovery in science and technology in the 18th and 19th centuries the enduring value of myths moved further away from literal interpretation. Our world becomes no less wondrous when we understand it. Alien worlds too. The first century of space travel was in craft named for Wedgwood’s figures from myths — Apollo, Gemini — the second century’s robot rovers on Mars are named for the qualities that underpinned Charles Darwin’s explorations — Spirit, Curiosity . ..
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Mark Ryden creates porcelain figures and crockery decorated with figures from American political history, fairy tales and contemporary pop culture. Nick Cave’s songs are studded with references to myths but also a deep fascination with the cultural impact of advances in science and technology: i.e. “Higgs Boson Blues”, the recent Red Hand Files post on Artificial Intelligence. ..
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I collect Bad Seeds / Grinderman merchandise in the way that previous generations would gradually add Wedgwood pieces to pass on to future generations. @mudaustralia ceramics have existed since 1994 but I only found them recently, and I’m in awe of them. They’re delicate but strong, and the unglazed exterior and powerful colours are reminiscent of Jasperware. The glazed interior makes them durable and adaptable to many uses. I can’t stop projecting all of Nick Cave’s coffee mugs onto Mud Beakers, imagining them as an expanding collection of heirlooms. ..
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@nickcaveofficial #ceramics #charlesdarwin #mythology #merchandise #marsrovers @nasa #nickcaveandthebadseeds @nickcaveofficial
FOUND OPPORTUNITY: @johnbutlertrio made a plea for all present to stir into action to protect the earth’s oceans before performing his composition “Ocean” at the first of his @SydneyOperaHouse concerts this week. The mellifluous beauty of both the music and the message struck me as an antidote to the melancholy of the last message of the Mars Rover Opportunity, who’d been officially declared dead the previous day. “My battery is low and it’s getting dark,” transmitted Opportunity in June of 2018 and was never heard from again. John Butler’s sincerity and integrity has both light and warmth enough to recharge any battery. ..
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It was a comment he made during the second of his concerts on the forecourt that made me think of the Mars Rover. When he was calling Missy Higgins to the stage to perform a duet with him he said he’s bad at learning other people’s songs so they’d have to perform one of his. “I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me,” he explained, a line from Beck’s song “Loser”. When Opportunity landed on the surface of Mars in 2004 and was preparing to turn on its systems and begin roving it played Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run”. I started thinking of the creation of a mythology for remotely operated robots (as opposed to humanoid robots) with “Born to Run” their equivalent of “The Epic of Gilgamesh”. ..
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I made up a playlist in my iTunes library for this robot mythology that includes the Wallflowers song “One Headlight’ and Beck’s “Loser”, which has a punk version of a robot rover on the cover of MELLOW GOLD, the album it’s featured on. The song always reminds me of the wild anarchic robotic performance art of @survivalresearchlabs , the ‘act’ I’d most like to see perform on the Opera House’s forecourt. ..
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@benmarshall_sydneyoperahouse #rockmusic #robot #marsrover @nasajpl #marsroveropportunity #marsrovercuriosity @springsteen #brucespringsteen @beck
MAX’S DONUT THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE: I am phenomenally amused & inspired by terriers, screwball comedy movies, the Marx Brothers, the music of Louis Armstrong & Duke Ellington, & the song lyrics of Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin & Johnny Mercer. Yesterday @edward.lear, the Cary Grant of terriers, met up with two fellow Welsh terriers. The collective noun is “a disobedience of welshies”. Terriers have an independent streak, are full of character, and have a great sense of humour. @mairakalman ’s dog poet Max Stravinsky isn’t exactly a terrier, but he is all of these things. And in a volume of his adventures where he goes to Hollywood to write the script for a Screwball Comedy there’s an illustration that has become for me a perspective device. ..
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The donut is the middle ground where most of life takes place, it’s a closed circle. Around it is the big picture, the atmospherically inaccessible world of comprehending climate change, government, big business, multi-national immense architecture companies, the business of celebrity. And inside the hole, all that’s wondrous about terriers, screwball comedies, etc. where creatures of all kinds are genuinely happy and creatively define the elements that enrich their lives. ..
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The architecture criticism that interests me goes beyond the donut and focuses on the outer orbit around the donut and inside the hole. I’m reading, at the same time, @marklamster ’s biography of Philip Johnson and @langealexandra ’s THE DESIGN OF CHILDHOOD. What I most value about the biography of Johnson is how to comprehend the big picture: Johnson was a flawed, compromised human being with an uneven design legacy. Knowing what we know about Johnson’s egregious beliefs can we still love the old Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building, for example? Mark Lamster helps us evaluate these concerns in a way that helps us more generally. For example, the Marx Brothers became famous in a time of rampant sexism and racism … but .. Harpo Marx was a terrier in human form, a sweet, strange, wild individual that may redeem temporal transgressions. & Alexandra Lange’s book focuses on how we form and nurture wondrous individuals.
VICTORIANA: I imagine that Ash, in William Gibson’s novel THE PERIPHERAL, is dressed in the 22nd century’s version of clothing from the design house of @alexandermcqueen . ..
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“Ash, flesh white as paper … Her hand quite black with tattoos, a riot of wings and horns, every bird and beast of the Anthropocene extinction, overlapping line drawings of a simple yet touching precision … Netherton was watching the intricate texture of her bustier, which resembled a microminiature model of some Victorian cast-iron station roof, its countless tiny panes filmed as by the coal smoke of fingerling locomotives, yet flexing as she breathed and spoke … Hair the nano-black of the lace at her throat, the bustier of perpetually rain-streaked iron and glass, as if viewed through the wrong end of a telescope” ….
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This intricately carved wooden prosthesis designed by Lee Alexander McQueen is from the height of the steampunk era at the end of the 20thC. Swipe right for a new buttoned boot designed by Sarah Burton inspired by the bucolic imagery within Victoriana. “A pioneering traveller’s passion for natural beauty and the bringing home of images of landscapes rich with exotic blossom and birds.” ..
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William Gibson has commented on how “emergent technologies were irreversibly altering the landscape of the Victorians. BLEAK HOUSE is a quintessential Victorian text, but it is also probably the best steampunk landscape that will ever be. Dickens really nailed it, especially in those proto-Ballardian passages in which everything in nature has been damaged by heavy industry. But there were relatively few voices like Dickens then. Most people thought the progress of industry was all very exciting. Only a few were saying, Hang on, we think the birds are dying.” ..
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This week it seems as though we’ve pitched forward into the post-natural intensely ruined world of THE PERIPHERAL … corpses of a million dead fish piled up along the banks of the drought starved Murray Darling River and extreme heat burning stone fruit from within on trees in Australia … train tracks being set on fire during a ‘Polar Vortex’ in Chicago that rendered the city colder than Antarctica.
NICK CAVE’S PHENOMENAL CURIOSITY: I imagine Nick’s brain as a centrifuge, constantly taking in a phenomenal range of raw materials, keeping them spinning until the dense, very important, crucial ideas and observations are separated and become the grist for Bad Seeds albums while everything else is flung to the edges to underpin soundtracks, novels, unusual memoirs, film scripts, etc. I find myself transfixed by these ‘edge works’. At the time that Nick was writing the film script for John Hillcoat’s movie LAWLESS I gave him a collection of my most treasured Duke Ellington recordings including John Coltrane and Ellington playing together. He was momentarily taken with Ellington & Charles Mingus playing “Caravan”...
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While in Australia performing the IN CONVERSATION concerts he was thinking about Artificial Intelligence and wrote in the RED HAND FILES about questioning the possibility of artificially inducing vulnerability and all that’s spinning in the centrifuge that can’t be quantified. He mentioned the strangeness of awe, that it’s too shadowy to be able to be algorithmically fabricated. ..
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Something I am continually in awe of is how thoughtfully and meaningfully Nick is able to process insights from arts and sciences that become grist for powerful metaphors and descriptions: “Prince, that tiny cluster of purple atoms”. ..
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My own centrifuge is less efficient, a device that backfires. It’s something that Wile E. Coyote might have ordered from the ACME catalogue. I’ve been thinking about AI applied to engineering, particularly robotics engineer Ken Goldberg’s suggestions that the human element will always be crucial, that AI won’t replace or surpass what makes us humans, as Nick concurs “it doesn’t have the nerve.” “We need a shift in mindset, rather than ‘us against the machines,’” Ken has said, “let’s focus on ‘us with the machines,’ and explore the potential for machine collaboration—how the combined strengths of diverse humans and diverse machines can enhance the human experience.”.
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#nickcaveandthebadseeds @nickcaveofficial #engineering #robotics #wileecoyote #awe #artificialintelligence #johncoltrane #dukeellington #jazz
