Random Shit

There's a Nick Cave quote somewhere that goes something like:
"Good ideas don't come from sitting around trying to think of good ideas. Ideas only come from the work itself. Ideas come when you're working."
Or maybe it's Francis Bacon.
The real quote might not even be super close to what I wrote, but that's the way I remember it.

Anyway I am finding it to be true.

Now that I have started working on the faces for one of my Burning Man proposals, other ideas are coming to me.

Berlin is full of parks, which are much more like small forests than what we in the States think of as a "city park"...

and because they are small forests they are full of trees, and because they are full of trees they are full of "dead and down" trees. We were walking one day a few months ago and Christina started carving the bark off a dead birch tree, talking about how her grandfather in Sweden used to make little tobacco boxes from the bark. Of course I had to try it... and yes, carving bark off of dead birch trees is very satisfying... but I ended up being rather more inspired by its sculptural qualities, and ended up making this:

That was a while ago (and yes, I've shown this image here before).
Now I've got an idea for a new sculpture which again incorporates birch, but this time in larger pieces. One of Berlin's many forest-like parks is on the way to Kodiak's school, and I've been noticing some fallen birches...

so I went out with a hand-saw this evening. I did quite well for myself.
Good thing we put a cargo rack on the roof of our little Skoda Eurobox!

This new idea is partially inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey, and will incorporate a mannequin and birch tree parts, among other things.

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The face is coming along, although not without pain. 

I don't really like sculpting in polystyrene foam; it's very difficult to get a smooth finish, and more importantly it is not at all easy to add material. With clay, if an area is low or needs more volume, you just add more clay. Sculpting foam is a process of removal (much like sculpting stone), so you need to "creep up" on the forms, volumes, and contours that you are trying to attain. If you go too deep, you've made a problem for yourself. Admittedly, in foam the problem is not as severe as it presumably is in stone, because there are ways to fix it.

After getting pretty close to the final form in foam, I coated it with a mix of drywall filler and white glue to seal it. this gives a surface which can be sanded to a nice finish. Unfortunately, after coating it, I suddenly saw all the ways in which it was not symmetrical, so I've been using the filler material to "sculpt" and correct these problems.

I went to another sauna spa place in Berlin a few days ago with my old friend Ari Gold, and during our conversation I used a sculpture metaphor to try to illuminate a point about getting too fixated on details without seeing the bigger picture. What I said was "sometimes I sculpt a pair of eyes and get very focused on making the details perfect, only to step back and notice that one eye is too low." Ironically the very next day I had that exact experience! Considering how difficult it is to "re-sculpt" foam, the best solution was to cut out the eye and move it up.

(Uggh... as I look now I see that the eyes are still too small... even after several stages of enlarging them! Grrrr....)

Anyway, the sculpture is coming along. I've just begun the second one.

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The second sauna spa place (where I went with Ari) was perhaps a bit better than Liquidrom, but not by virtue of their having any particularly hot water. In fact the water there was, on the whole, even cooler. I guess the German approach is to sit in really hot saunas and then cool down in lukewarm water. I wonder if it's just cultural? Or perhaps it comes from some sense of safety? (Maybe they think hot water is really dangerous?) Anyway, the place is called "Vabali". It's got a sort of Bali-Indonesia theme. It's really big; probably 4 times the size of Liquidrom, with 8-10 saunas. The highlight for me was the "Russian Sauna," which involved a very handsomely built young man dunking the branches from some very aromatic tree (I think it was Eucalyptus) in really hot water and then thrashing them around in the air, so that all of us (the sauna was really crowded) were showered with super hot water and aromatic steam. There were a few gay guys in the sauna who were thrashing the "sauna master" back with bits of the branches that had come off, flirtatiously saying "ein Bisschen zurück fur dich!" (A little bit back for you!). It was hilarious. Anyway the whole thing was actually a really relaxing and nice experience. 8/10.

Ari and I spent a few minutes talking about the value of being in the presence of naked women... a value that is on the surface a merely aesthetic phenomenon, but ends up transcending the merely aesthetic and transmitting something more like a sense of well-being or calm, a message that the world is right and life is worth living. I tried to convey something of this sentiment in an earlier post.

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Be careful when changing the battery on your iPhone! My phone has been slowing down, so I decided to replace the battery. Well, the batteries in these things are held in place by the most industrial-grade double-stick tape I've ever come across. I basically could not overcome the adhesiveness of this stuff. As I pulled and pulled on the battery, the battery itself started to fold. I thought "no big deal," and kept pulling. But then suddenly I saw a small spark and the battery started to burn and pour out smoke! Apparently I had caused an internal short-circuit in one of these famously dangerous lithium ion batteries. I ran out onto our tiny patio, frantically blowing the smoke and heat away from the other electrical and electronic components inside the phone. Watching this battery burn was really fascinating; basically it started at one end and there was a sort of "burn line," the leading edge of the combustion, that advanced slowly down the phone, leaving the area behind it burnt and sort of "exploded" looking. It took about 20 seconds to burn the whole battery, and it put out a lot of acrid smoke.

This is how it looked, even when still in the phone!

When it was done I sort of doubted that the phone would still work. The battery had thankfully been unplugged, but several plastic components next to the battery were partly melted from the heat. On the plus side, it was much easier to remove now that the double-stick tape had been softened by the heat (but it still took a lot of scraping with a razor blade to really remove the last vestiges of the tape.) Well I installed the new battery and amazingly enough the damn thing still works. I guess I got lucky.

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I've begun to consider whether there might be some value in writing a frank and brutal assessment of my own failings... a sort of autobiography of the ways I disappoint myself. Buddhists and therapists say you should treat yourself gently, but Nietzsche and Cop Shoot Cop* have different ideas. I think you could actually do both: look at your shortcomings with clear but compassionate eyes. I don't really know if this exercise would ultimately produce a positive or a negative result, but I think that if you handled it right it would probably be positive.

*I love those lyrics, especially the first two lines. I think the song is pretty obviously about drug addiction, but I've always considered that it could be about any indulgence or weakness of character that we want to overcome.

Helga, I will write more about Berlin... I promise!

Until then,
Over and Out