terrain.org
>Lost Roads
>
Lisa Bickmore reflects on 50 years of roads taken @ Terrain.org.
read more from Terrain.org
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )>Ancient lines of sight
>
Elizabeth Dodd wonders about the relationships between seeing, imagination, and landscape @ Terrain.org. The essay won Terrain.org’s 2010 non-fiction essay contest.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )
What does a sinuous petroglyph call to mind? I mean the pecked or carved line that curves beckoningly back and forth across the face of the rock, or the top of the boulder, or the shelf in the cliff where someone once crouched twenty feet or so above the canyon floor and hollowed out a small basin the depth of my own cupped hand, making this particular shape that snakes across the Cliff House sandstone I’ve slithered up in order to look out where Andy is measuring sightlines along the southern horizon. What does it look like, this petroglyph stilled in its hint of motion? What does it mean?
There, one analogy appeared effortlessly: snake.
Sometimes I think river or wash, side-winding across sandstone the way a watercourse wiggles along the alluvial plain. Or a journey across landscape, through time, a mapped record plotted on the stiff page of the cliff’s wall. A sine wave, sinus-oidal, the shape taken by my voice, calling back down to where Andy sits taking notes, or the light from the sun that keeps teasing from behind cloud cover, or, a thousand miles away, the waves of the Pacific that haven’t yet dragged into break and foam on the wet beach. Here is the sandstone, each quartz particle locked in conglomerate stasis or chafed into motion, sifting against the cliff where a loose bit of rock shifts under my foot, a wave of adrenalin rushing through me. Here is the figure, waves abraded into the cliff face.
But this week I’ve been reading about the evolution of the eye, the first molecular hints toward what would, hundreds of generations later, become vision, and so I think, opsins. These are the little proteins that snake in and out of the cell membrane of a photoreceptor, where, along with retinal, they facilitate a body’s chemical response to light. “Snake” is the word used in the article I was reading, and though I later came across illustrations I thought were more suggestive of the tight curls formed when you drag decorative ribbon across the scissors’ blade, “snake” spoke to my imagination.
>Glass Mountains
>
Aisha Sloan mixes photographs and reflections to explore the landscape of Los Angeles @ terrain.org.
In the City of Angels, you can live in a hillside house where the courtyard juts into the sky and spills out over a precipice. There are walls made out of glass, creating the illusion that what lies outside—trees, a thousand city lights, or the yellow desert hills—is a part of your living room. Houses manage to encapsulate a sense of spareness and solitude in the midst of a city with almost ten million inhabitants.
I grew up a few miles south of Los Angeles’s famous east/west artery, Sunset Boulevard, down the hill from the types of celebrity homes that best demonstrate a classic Los Angeles aesthetic. Brentwood, a wealthy enclave between UCLA and the Santa Monica beach, is home to some of the earliest examples of modern architecture. Our apartment is on the second floor of a brown, two-story building just on the borderline between Brentwood and West Los Angeles. It is not particularly chic, but there were jade plants, pollution-pink sunsets, and olive trees outside our windows. Before the cream-colored condominiums arrived, anyway.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )When I return home I spend time at a coffee shop that stands on an odd block: outdoor seating spills onto a concrete triangle that sticks out between San Vicente Boulevard and Gorham like a peninsula. Some time before the café arrived, there was an Italian restaurant that faired poorly after one of its waiters was found murdered alongside Nicole Brown Simpson just a few blocks away. Today, espresso machines reflect light with the sophistication of a black-and-white photograph in the noisy coffee bar. The bright blue day makes a lovely backdrop for the coral trees that stand parallel to the café’s wall of north-facing windows. An elderly woman once told me that when she first moved west, this part of the city consisted of little more than a grove of orange trees.
>When are we truly in some particular place?
>
@ The Smart Set Paula Marantz Cohen writes on the migration series paintings of Jacob Lawrence.
Soon after I began reading Sharon Wilkerson’s new book, The Warmth of Other Suns, which uses ethnography to explore the great migration of African-Americans from the South to Northern cities during the first half of the 20th century, I came face to face with another treatment of this subject during a visit to Washington, D.C. Wandering into the new addition to the Phillips Collection, I was confronted in the first gallery with a set of paintings by Jacob Lawrence entitled “The Migration of the Negro.” I had heard about these paintings, which chronicle the first wave of African-American migration to the North from 1916 to 1919. Stumbling upon them on the wall of this museum, I was dazzled by their expressiveness and power.
Tony Barrell reflects on his exile in Australia and the impossibilities of going back at The Griffith Review.
I hadn’t been in Sydney that long and wasn’t used to much of it. As an Englishman everything was more familiar than it would be to most migrants to Australia, coming from the Balkans, Indo-China, Latin America and East Africa, but that very familiarity made it all the more strange. So many signs, institutions and English place names – Paddington, Kensington, King’s Cross, Canterbury, Cheltenham – colossal Victorian institutions, and cramped little red brick villas, but no Englishness at all. And, of course, it was hot. I had arrived in a steamy January heatwave; very different from what I was used to.
Then one day, after about a year, I had an epiphany. It didn’t make me feel that much more at home (that took at least two decades) but it connected me with others who might have felt even worse pangs of alienation. I was walking down King Street, Newtown, beyond the railway station around the corner and down the hill towards Alexandria. It had been a beautiful old shopping thoroughfare but now was rent with heavy traffic, and many of the businesses were run down or boarded up, but the signboard of one delicatessen caught my eye. The letters in black and green on a translucent plastic light box hanging from the awning said one word ‘Kalloni’. My heart jumped. I knew this word. Surely there could only be one meaning for it? I went inside. It was quite dark, but clean and full of Greek produce. There was yoghurt, fetta, sacks of beans and the yeasty honest smell of dried goods. There were stalks and flowers of oregano, sealed in clear plastic bags. The middle aged woman behind the counter did not speak much English, and my Greek has always been inadequate, but I had to ask her, ‘Are you from Kalloni?’
Lex Runciman considers the relationship between photography and landscape on a trip to Stonehenge @ Terrain.org.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )At my home in Oregon, whenever I go down the stairs I am confronted by a framed, 16 x 20 inch photograph of Stonehenge that I took one January morning in 2006. My wife Debbie and I had arrived with our coach driver Roger Thomas and 15 college students after a pleasant drive east from the city of Bath. We’d been in the UK only a couple of days, and jet lag was still an influence. We’d risen early to the largesse of a British breakfast (including salted fish and stewed tomatoes for those so inclined); we’d eaten our fill. The weather was gray but not raining, the countryside rolling, the coach pleasantly warm—several students fell asleep on the way. Only the shock of motion stopping woke them. Before we left the coach, I reminded them they needed to do some writing in their journals here, on site, before we left. They could do this as they walked or once they returned to the coach, but I wanted them to get some initial observations and responses on paper. Where such notes might lead we’d discuss later.
>Invisibilized Realities
>
 |
| horaciosalinas.net |
In the September issue of the The Believer there is an interview with Robyn Nagle, the athropologist-in-residence for the New York City Sanitation Department. Nagel is trying to build support for a Museum of Trash in the city, but such an idea is not easy to persuade in a city that is often overwhelmed with its trash and simply wishes it to be taken away. Nagle notes that everything we see is eventually trash, and yet we love to ignore this reality–or rather “invisibilize” it–thus making our response to trash a complex cognitive act: “it’s cognitive in that exact way: that it is quite highly visible, and constant, and invisibilized. So from the perspective of an anthropologist, or a psychologist, or someone trying to understand humanness: What is that thing? What is that mental process where we invisibilize something that’s present all the time? Nagle’s ideas prompted me to think about all the ways we might enact this cognitive process in other parts of our lives, and how writers and artists provoke us to see those realities we invisibilize each day.
At Cerise Press, writer Sun Yung Shin goes searching for the word adoptee (that doesn’t exist in English), as she tries to recover memories she never had: “It is a word that refers to a permanent exchange, it refers to the choice of the adopter, it defines the adoptee as an artifact, something created by the will of the adopter. The mother or father or parents do not have any word related to adopt attached to them.”
 |
| horaciosalinas.net |
Edward Schwarzchild meditates on writing and art at The Rumpus, moving between a number of fragmented memories that each seem to connect to the writer Nick Flynn: “When Nick speaks of what it means to be lost (as he does powerfully in Some Ether, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and The Ticking Is the Bomb) he occasionally cites a line from D. W. Winnicott: “It is joy to be hidden, but disaster not to be found.””
Spotlighting the influence of Western, liberal philosophies on Iranian intellectuals and activists, and the problems of the Left in Europe and North America to recognize this, is the subject of Danny Postel’s essay in The Liberal: ““There have been more translations of Kant into Persian in the past decade than into any other language”, reports Vali Nasr, “and these have gone into multiple printings”. Abdollah Momeni, the leader of Iran’s most prominent student-activist group (Daftar-e Tahkim-e Vahdat), claims Habermas as his chief inspiration. The speeches and writings of Akbar Ganji, Iran’s leading dissident, are peppered with references to Kant, John Stuart Mill and Albert Camus.”
In exploring the hidden, and not so hidden, sexual pleasures of malls, Molly Young dissects the experience of shopping at Hollister at The Believer: “The employees are selected for their insane good looks and friendliness, which creates the disorienting customer experience of receiving attention from people way out of your league over and over again. You can’t avoid having a sexual experience at Hollister, even if it’s just to stare at a greeter’s bullet-hard nipples. Hollister’s strategy may not be subtle, but it is clever. By literalizing the mall’s sexual promise in actual naked flesh, the brand makes it unnecessary for shoppers to wander elsewhere.”
 |
| horaciosalinas.net |
Oscar Paul Medina at The Hydra Magazine writes on the influences of Italian Futurist artist Luigi Russolo’s “art of noises” on contemporary music: “For Russolo, noise carries a two-fold meaning: the discordant atonality of machines and also natural non-traditional sounds. Animals, cars, waterfalls, jet engines, trains — the cacophony of coitus and the shrieking of a child crying — all these fall within the rubric of noise.”
Reflecting on the pleasures and limits of walking through nature with his ipod Simmons B. Buntin, editor of terrain.org, considers our current conflicts around listening and experience: “I accepted the digital music player with a mixture of anticipation and regret. As with my adoption of any new technology, I knew it would change my habits and relationship with the wider world. Though I design websites and work on computers all day, I’m always wary of new gadgets. It’s not that I’m old-fashioned; instead, there’s something about losing a connection to the visceral world, an unwillingness to substitute virtual for actual.”
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )
altimoniere 