§ Hey, remember all of the mulch I so excitedly spread throughout all of my garden beds last weekend? Well apparently it was sour which quickly became apparent when the lower leaves of the most of the young plants rapidly shriveled up and turned brown. The strawberries seemed to get the worst of it, which sucks.
§ I think it’s safe to say at this point we won’t be getting a spring breba crop out of the outdoor brown turkey fig. However, some of the fruit on the indoor fig plant is finally ripening, which is a fine substitute.
§ The eastern American toads have been out in full force this week. Their incredible camouflage makes walking basically anywhere in my yard a nerve wracking enterprise. There isn’t any significant body of water within miles of my house so it isn’t clear to me where exactly they’re coming from.
§ My big exhibition on Cleveland’s steel industry finally opens next Thursday. I’m proud of how it has come together. That giant boat model I mentioned a few weeks ago was finished and delivered on Tuesday—it makes for a wild centerpiece. More than anything else, I’m excited to finally free up some brain space to think about other projects once this whole thing wraps up.
§ I enjoyed reading Spencer Chang’s recent thoughts on art and interactivity:
I don’t believe in precious art and I hate how art has become something that you can only see but not feel… What does a fine art work that functions as a toy look and feel like? What is something that resists destruction, that reveals through direct experience, even to a child, new worlds?
This is the in-between space that interactive science centers, like the one I work at, operate in. This balancing act is a large part of why I find my job so invigorating.
§ I generally don’t watch much YouTube so I was surprised to see a recommendation at the top of the homepage that was so obviously my type of thing: a channel full of quiet, dialog-free videos of daily life on a family farm in Azerbaijan. The star of the show is unquestionably the trained crow that follows the main couple everywhere they go.
§ To follow up from last week, I started reading The New House by David Leo Rice. Passage after passage is filled with insane imagery.
A representative excerpt:
“This lesson,” his mother continues, …concerns a place known as the Art World. A monstrous pit of vipers and demons, fanged, poisonous, pitiless creatures. The very place that Bosch represented, as literally as possible, in the few paintings he left us.
[…]
The Art World seeks to pry out whatever is unique and beautiful in a person and roast it like an oyster in the harsh neon light of the City, chucking the shell into some windswept alley to be sniffed at and pissed on by stray dogs.
§ This blog was featured in The Internet Phone Book. If you really look closely, you can even see it right there in the promo images. I think I might need to pick up a copy.
§ My birthday was on Friday. I had my first true Korean BBQ experience and then visited a native plant sale at Holden Arboretum where I picked up wild blackcurrant and pawpaw(!!) seedlings.
