In college I often studied the motion of bubbles in a glass of beer. I drew on my emerging mathematical skills and my knowledge of physics to depict their journey in the form of an equation which I named The Beer Bubble Equation.
It became a sculpture at which I chipped and polished from time to time, often putting it aside for weeks until I was struck with a fresh draft of inspiration.
Ultimately I abandoned the perfection of the equation for the mere simplicity of drinking the beer. Somehow it never occurred to me to question what was the personal meaning to me of this diversion, of the subtle contemplation of the silvery beads and their amber environment.
Turns out the Beer Bubble Equation was just an embryonic form of a thought that has emerged into clarity over these many years. I was reminded while watching some lemon seeds in a glass of seltzer last evening.
Bubbles would form on the surface of a seed, like a gathering team of cherubim struggling to bear a damned soul aloft. Then, just at the juncture between water and air, right at that very moment when their efforts were most needed, they strayed from their duty, leaving the poor lemon seed to drop suddenly to the bottom, as if it were some unworthy burden.
But they were just bubbles, incapable of learning a lesson from one experience to the next, and so repeated the cycle for as long as I watched. Which had to be about 10 minutes, judging from the fact that I was able to record a video of it.
It reminded me of this video of ants I recorded. They were hauling away a huge bee, but every few minutes they would fall into the pool. Finally, they were just swept away.
I have often enjoyed shooting automata that perform their trick over and over again with no self-awareness. It’s nothing more or less than a personal metaphor of one’s own struggle to keep from repeating behaviors that go nowhere, like swimmerdude, below. He came from this video, which covered the same terrain.
This time I will attempt the unthinkable, tidying up a nexus of disasters with one simple trick: creating biodiesel from feed-lot hogs.
Think of it, energy independence plus car exhaust will smell like bacon. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan ‘It’s breakfast-time in America!’
With advances in hog liposuction, obtaining the fat necessary to create this new amazing product can be done humanely. And think of the increase in self-esteem the hogs will feel when they marvel at their new svelte figures. Now how much would you pay?
Back to eggs for a moment. If I read this right, 380-million eggs have been ‘recalled.’ (“Come back here Sunny, you’re all salmonelly. You don’t want the public eatin’ ya.”)
The fact that you can ‘recall’ a stroller because it pinches an infant’s finger, or an SUV with a self-acceleration feature, and also ‘recall’ eggs or, say 143 million pounds of ground beef, should be a flashing red light that there are deal-breakers in the system that mass-produces food for the hundreds of millions of gullets that constitute its customers.
Thanks to folks like Michael Pollan, there is a growing public awareness of the inherent toxic structure of our mass-market model of food production. Still, the most obvious conclusion has not been formally stated, so I will happily do so here: humans are now feed-lot animals. In the Food Chain, ‘feed-lot’ is a characteristic that accumulates at the top, like PCBs or mercury.
Think about it, with 380 million eggs you could make an omelet large enough to inoculate salmonella in every man, woman and child in the USA. Where are the Guinness Book of Records folks? They need to send in an investigative team. Flipping a 380-million egg omelet without tearing is going to require lots of Yankee ingenuity. Roll camera.
So what, if anything, does the FDA have to do with this? Well, until the egg news broke, their latest escapade was their flip-flop on the issue of testing Gulf seafood for dispersant. They said they didn’t want to do it because developing a test was too hard. That, and the product name is ‘Corexit,’ so it must make everything alright. Right?
I understand their problem. Maybe the FDA scientists need to practice on alfalfa sprouts and come back to shrimp when their confidence has been sufficiently enhanced.
Their initial plan was to rely on ‘trained food sniffers.’ Here’s how it works. You put a plate of some dubious seafood in front of the enhanced olfactory assessment system. The sniffer then says, ‘Oooooo, whoah Nellie- that is s-t-i-n-k-y. Take it away and fetch my air-sickness bag.’
You have your answer. Simple, right?
Apparently, a trained sniffer can detect 1 part in a million of oil. That’s like one drop of oil in a gallon of water. Heck, that’s terrific. I’d gladly drink a gallon of water with only 0.99 drops of oil in it.
All of this unfolds as the BP gang is patting themselves on their collective backs. ‘We can’t even find any more oil to skim! Mission accomplished.’ Meanwhile the Wood’s Hole team is surveying a plume of hydrocarbons at 3000 feet below the surface that is the size of Manhattan.
I am going to wager that there will be some impact on the fisheries that will be a little longer-lasting than the PR folks at BP want to predict. Of course, the oceans will be fished-out sooner or later and we will be left with feed-lot fish to feed the feed-lot people.
I started making the Birds in Repose after I attended my sister’s wedding. She was radiant and especially beautiful that day, but she was dying.
When I returned to Newport Beach, where I was staying overnight before my return to Manhattan, I did some shooting and I came across this, Bird in Repose Number One:
It’s a real bird lying, dead, in a bed of succulents. The experience of that sight- that is, seeing the fact as a representative image, grabbed me immediately, and I decided to make some more images like it.
When birds die, sometimes it is like they just dropped from the sky, and probably in many cases that is what happens.
I like to imagine them gripping a branch, then teetering a bit on their perch and swinging into a brief, final, upside-down hang. Then they drop.
Either way, there is a ‘here one moment and gone the next’ quality to the landing.
I think that was haunting me at the time. Sometimes the future comes to you in images.
Here is an example. When we were moving into our house in the ‘burbs I did a walk-through. The place was broom-clean as was stipulated in the contract.
On the paved surface of the garage however, far in the back corner, brightly contrasting with the black asphalt, sat a white object.
I walked over and it turned out to be a little miniature pair of plastic lungs from a model. It was the only thing on the floor, which was otherwise quite spotless. I’m not superstitious, but for the time that I lived in that house, my sister’s lung cancer dominated my life.
So finding the plastic lungs was like reading the title of the next chapter of your book. How aptly named it was.
The abundant rosemary in Newport Beach gave me the idea of having images of birds lying in a bed of herbs- part bower, part herbal funeral pyre, part recipe.
I decided I wanted to purchase some silk birds and lay them out on canvas with garlands of parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. I haven’t done it yet, so it may remain an idea forever.
Below are the two images that were used for the composite in the first image.
As many of you know, I had been working on the treatment for Planet of the Dogs well before the passing of Mr. Heston. At that time we were going to have him reprise his role from Planet of the Apes.After the death of Mr. Heston we decided just to make a movie about a [...]
Come closer, until you can see my face reflected in the drop hanging portentously from the dropper. There I am, see? I’m waving at you, see? Very good. We’ve made eye contact. The drop at the end of the dropper. And now, into your eye! You blink. Blink! All is well. Some spills out and [...]
Grant to Study Flea Behavior Backfires: Town Caught Off-guard By Plague Mayor Calls Outbreak ‘Containable.’ What was once heralded as a boon to town coffers has now turned into a boondoggle of town coughers. At a press conference in April of this year, Dr. Jersey Vanderplinth spoke in vaulted tones when he announced he had [...]
Briefly Noted The Smithston library, as part of its continuing social awareness sessions will be hosting ‘The Social Awareness Notion Commotion.’ This unflinching hip-hop theater troupe, which includes several amputee break-dancers, will be presenting their musical ‘Disfigured is Just Differently Figured.’ Several disfigured persons will be present to help audience members achieve compassion and empathy. [...]
Garden Club Meeting Erupts In Melée The Summer Season meeting of the Smithston Garden Club ended in tragedy last night after President Dan Daly unexpectedly issued an executive order barring several popular varieties of Begonia from the Anal Growers’ Competition. Upon hearing the ruling, Mrs. Julia Lutefiske, a lifelong Smithston resident, leapt from her front-row [...]
Police and Fire Blotter A gas station on the corner of Hayward and Vincent erupted early this morning in a blast of flame that could be seen from the neighboring town of Garage Heights.The incident occurred during a 3am shift change and some workers were asleep. One of the attendants reported awaking to a shower [...]
I am an escapee from the Yerkes Primate Institute.
I wore a monkey suit for 15 years. At the beginning, it constituted the basic research for my doctoral thesis entitled ‘The Behavioral Attributes of Zookeepers in Primate-Human Transactions.’
But I quickly grew complacent, and greedily snatched bananas from the hands of the trainers, like the other monkeys. I laughed inwardly at the baboons and their inability to learn grammar, and happily took their portions of passion fruit and guava, as a reward for mastering the simplistic gestural sign language we were taught.
The baboons weren’t great at sign language, but they made their contempt for me unmistakably clear, hurling nasty bundles at me, as I cajoled the professors for an extra handful of peanuts.
It was easy work, but still, I began to resent the jeering attitudes of the baboons, and plotted ways to exact my revenge. This was child’s play, of course, and the results, like seeing a cage door slam into an unsuspecting baboon’s head, were satisfying, so I guess I was content with my life.
I suppose I should attribute the episode to my youth, which was eked-out on a wind-swept rock composed of an alkaline salt that blistered my feet, yet kept the skin supple and silky smooth, as if they were the feet of a much younger young man.
On Fridays, a packet ship would arrive with supplies from the mainland. Occasionally, when my requests for depilatory cream or unusually-shaped lightbulbs were fulfilled, I would open a tin of Belgian horse meat in celebration, selflessly spreading generous swaths on crackers pilfered from the monsoon shelter. These I shared with the beautiful native women-folk, who received them eagerly as a welcome change from the roasted coconuts that served as their primary staple.
Yet they were an insolent bunch, prone to making promises they were unwilling to keep. Trips to the top of the date palm trees would seldom yield the longed-for fruit, and suitors were compelled to invent unusual dance steps that culminated always in mockery and derision.
