The Idea Blog

“‘Every season, I go to the factory in Italy and start looking through files of what we did before,’ he says.  ’I spend a week in a vacuum, staring at the computer, with no distractions.  And every season starts from something that came before.’”

From a profile by Vanessa Friedman of American fashion designer Rick Owens in the March 20, 2010 fashion edition of the Financial Times, which also noted that the designer “does not go on research trips to Africa, or haunt flea markets or film festivals for different ‘inspiration’ each season.”

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In hindsight, the idea that Joan Gelfand and Marty Castleberg would team up to produce a CD of Joan’s poetry enhanced by Marty’s music — and vice versa, Marty’s work by Joan’s — seems obvious.  The two beautiful expressions so naturally complement each other.  Does it even matter how the idea came about?

I think so, because it reminds me that ideas can grow modestly, one step at a time.  Marty had begun providing simple  background musical accompaniment to  my friend and neighbor Joan when she read at bookstores, cafes and other venues in the Bay Area.  It was a nice thing to do.  It helped set Joan’s readings apart from others — important, of course, because one reason poets do public readings is to market themselves.  Audiences liked what they heard, and Joan and Marty felt increasingly comfortable playing off each other’s words and notes.

But the experience would end when the reading ended.  Joan and Marty decided that they wanted to have a permanent record of what they were doing together.  They also wanted to push themselves into a new area of deeper musical/verbal interaction and experimentation.  Fast forward to …

… the CD called “Transported” — produced by Marty’s new company Daveland Productions (itself an outgrowth of the collaboration) and introduced in November 2009.  ”Transported” can be heard/downloaded/bought at www.joangelfand.com/listen or www.digstation.com or www.itunes.apple.com.  Oh, and a painting of mine provides the artwork on the disc cover and the CD itself.

Joan and Marty’s collaboration continues, as they have written a piece on the project for the current issue of the literary magazine Caveat Lector and performed at the magazine’s recent launch party.

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“You’ve got to walk by rivers or through woods every day for at least an hour.  And doing that for five years changed the way I write.  It’s meditative, and you get to spend a lot of time by the water. That’s been really important.”

From Sarah Hemming’s report in the January 30/31, 2010 issue of the Financial Times on playwright Jez Butterworth (with Mr. Butterworth explaining the “profound effect” that moving to rural England — and walking his dog there — has had on his work).

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“‘After you’ve written about 23 cordless phones, the novelty kind of wears off,’ he said.  ’The nature of advertising is that you have to be enthusiastic and positive all the time.  ’Youth in Revolt’ was kind of the reverse of that.’”

From a story by Jesse McKinley in The New York Times on January 26, 2010 about C.D. Payne, who was a “bored senseless copywriter” when he self-published what turned out to be “a critical success … the 1993 cult … underground hit” novel, “Youth in Revolt.”

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Imagine that you like to sail.  Imagine also that you are a “planetary geologist.”

And now imagine that it’s your job to figure out how to explore Titan, a moon of Saturn.  Titan is covered with pools of  methane, which is a gas on Earth but a liquid on Titan.

If you can imagine all this, you would be Ellen Stofan, who is leading a team of Titan experts aiming to convince NASA to use their design — essentially, a boat with a mast to hold a camera instead of a sail — on a mission to Titan that might launch in 2016 and arrive in 2022.

In her story “Exploring a Moon by Boat” on National Public Radio on September 16, 2009, Nell Greenfield Boyce profiled Dr. Stofan and her unique idea — “a probe that would splash down and float around.”

According to the story, “that would be something new.  In the past, space exploration has been done with spaceships that orbit planets or fly by them, or with probes that land on a planet’s surface and maybe drive around, like the Mars rovers.”

And now … imagine all the early explorers who “set sail” to find the “new world.”  Has much changed?

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“Q. You are studying the structure of dog brains.  How did that project begin?  A. My wife and I took our pet pug for spinal surgery.  At the vet’s office, there were all these MRIs sitting around, hundreds of them, and it struck me: ‘Hey, dogs aren’t covered by Hipaa!  Their records aren’t confidential!’  It was like discovering a goldmine of data.”

From a Q&A interview with Princeton professor and neuroscientist Dr. Samuel Wang in the February 9, 2010 issue of The New York Times.

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“Each collection begins with a constellation of such images, and from there a loose theme arises. The muted colors and marbled fabrics in the 2009 fall collection were intended to resemble granite, slate, marble: ‘the materials used in the structure of a home,’ the designers wrote in an e-mail. The idea arrived when the sisters drove by a cluster of dilapidated houses alongside the freeway.”

From “Twisted Sisters” by Amanda Fortini, a profile of Kate and Laura Mulleavy and their fashion house Rodarte, in the January 18, 2010 issue of The New Yorker.

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Beyond their obvious similarities — quilts by women in isolated communities — two shows that have come through the deYoung Museum in San Francisco in recent years have strongly tugged at my imagination.  Truly, how did the women of Gee’s Bend, Alabama and the various Amish settlememts in Pennsylvania and the Midwest — who did not know of each other, yet worked in strikingly similar ways — get their ideas?

The quick answer, I think, is — through their lives.  Their circumstances, the materials available to them, the visual images occuring in their homes and towns and natural surroundings, their religious beliefs, their weddings and births and deaths — all these and many more factors were distilled in an abstract, non-representational fashion through these women’s hearts and minds and out through their hands into the world.  And until Gee’s Bend and the Amish were “discovered,” the world consisted only of the women’s immediate communities, where their quilts were objects of use — sometimes everyday use, sometimes reserved for special occasions — not objects of art.

The Gee’s Bend/Amish isolation also extended to any influence imposed by the greater world of art. Apparently, there was no such influence.  To wit –

“The bold formal inventiveness of Gee’s Bend quilts is truly remarkable and is responsible for the immediate impact they have on art viewers.  Given this fact, it is natural to seek comparisons or context with other art.  We do know that the quiltmakers were not aware of the geometric explorations of twentieth-century modernist abstract painters such as Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, or Ellsworth Kelly.  Yet to many eyes (including mine) there is an uncanny dialogue with this separate and distinct line of art history.  Pehaps the common thread is that both the quiltmaker and the modernist masters seek the challenges and pleasure of creating visually complex images.”  (From “Beyond Gee’s Bend: The Future of Art,” an essay by Dana Friis-Hansen in “Mary Lee Bendolph, Gee’s Bend Quilts, and Beyond” published by the Austin Museum of Art)

“Many have compared the abstract geometry of Amish quilts to the works of acclaimed modernist painters such as Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, Josef Albers, Ellsworth Kelly, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, and Victor Vasarely.  Any such comparisons are problematic, however, because they are built on visual coincidence, not on any documented historical connection or known influence in either direction.  Amish women got there first, and they got there whole; they began making quilts around 1880 and were thus working with full-fledged abstract design decades before any of these men were painting grids, color fields, optical illusions, or minimalist reductions.  And, while the designs of the quilts appear modern to eyes accustomed to looking at abstract art, they are not the work of modernists at all.”  (From “Fundamentally Abstract: The Aesthetic Achievement of Amish Quiltmakers,” an essay by Robert Shaw in “Amish Abstractions,” published by the Fine Arts Musems of San Francisco)

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“Apple is regularly voted the most innovative company in the world, but its inventiveness takes a peculiar form.  Rather than developing entirely new product categories, it excels at taking existing, half-baked ideas and showing the rest of the world how to do them properly.”

From an article in the January 31, 2010 issue of The Economist about the introduction of the Apple iPad.

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