enter the year of the golden sun or spore...

here to say happy new year is a 1961 gold ink drawing by harry bertoia, one of my heroes, who has been mentioned here several times. bertoia worked with the eames in cranbrook (and back here in LA), designed furniture, made incredibly underrated abstract monotypes, worked with sound sculpture, self-released a series LP records of his sound sculpture, created large scale sculpture for public spaces, etc.

over the years i have been lucky enough to buy a few cheaply priced monotypes (some of which i will try to post in the near future); but because the monotype was harry's preferred mode of drawing, actual traditional pen or pencil on paper drawings are rarely seen.

the drawing pictured above was created to accompany a letter describing a sculpture that harry was offering for sale to a collector. it shows a sculpture described in the letter as 7 feet tall with a four foot diameter orb on top and the entire structure resting on a marble base. the selling price in 1961, direct from the artist, was $1200... i suppose the price now would be at least ten times that.

in light of how much bertoia's works were inspired by nature, it seems fitting to post this spore or sun (or blue moon perhaps) as it sprouts up from the ground as a symbol of the new year risen...

when poets are buried beneath letters...

two pictures of the same site. the first taken by roland penrose in 1937 of no. 44 howland street in london, which was the house where rimbaud and verlaine stayed from 1872 - 1873. at the time the photograph was taken, there was a plaque out front commemorating verlaine, while rimbaud in the late 1930's was not considered important enough to be mentioned.

the second photograph is the same site, showing that the rimbaud/verlaine house was demolished to make room for this mid 1960's post office.

one of the interesting things about this, is that at the time it was built, the post office was a fairly exciting modern building, and i'm sure there must've been some wonderfully heated discussions surrounding the value of a building's history versus the value of a building's architecture.

if the post office ended up becoming a mid level landmark such as libeskind's jewish museum or meier's getty cluster, would it eventually add more to a city than a broken down apartment that was once the home of two of the most important modern poets of the last 100 years; or, would the humble building's history eventually become a kind of pilgrimage site, with a greater kind of cultural value... and which would stand the test of time better.

how on earth would anyone in the mid 1960's have a sense of whether or not a modern post office would be of value and feel modern 50 years later; and similarly who could know if 70 years after penrose made his pilgrimage whether or not anyone would still be reading rimbaud or verlaine.

the magazine i pulled these images from made no comments in the text as to what was lost or gained in this situation... nor do they mention the irony that these two writers had part of their history demolished to make room for a gigantic structure used for sorting small traveling pieces of writing... a building to house words in the midst of their journeys.

the long and wavy line...

this image was part of an article from an old radio and tv magazine. i believe it was related to television transmission and reception... the letters are keys to the illustrations and their meanings, which i mistakenly cut away. i think i like them better as the shapes of the sounds of the letters they are connected to.

it would be nice to see images of all the words one could make with the letters: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, j, k, l.

i wonder what these words would look like:

add ace ache age aged aced addage ale all able affable allege babble back bad baggage baffle bag bade badge bale bake bagel bead beef beech beach bed be bee beg bell behead beheaded blab blah black bleach bleed bleak bled beak black blade chafe chad cheek cab cabbage cage caged cake caked cede ceded dab dabble decade dad deed deeded deaf deface defaced dead deal each ebb edge egg eagle efface flack flake flaked flag flab fable face faced fad fade faded fake faked fleece feel feed fed gab gaffe gag gage gaged gale geek glad glade...

and i wonder how long that beautiful wavy line of 11 interchangeable parts, in endless combinations, would be...