Friday, November 11, 2005

More Posts Soon
I have been feeling the slow-departing residuals of last Sautrday's food poisoning all this week which has left me disinclined to post new blitherings but I am in the process of cobbling up a look at the disgraceful Mary Mapes's so-called "journalism" for which, believe it or not, I've stumbled upon a radical new cultural referent. Hint: It's not Plan 8 jornalism, nor is it Plan 10 journalism....

But in the interim, here a link to Bathsheba Grossman's most remarkable sculpture. It puts me in mind of an old friend, no longer with us, who worked at the National Bureau of Standards in what precise capacity I know not but I always think of him as a physicist. Upon his retirement, he was finally able to do what he really wanted to do: become an artist. His sculpture had a sort of scientific bent - it was in metal (he even built his own forge to cast his work, or maybe that's kiln instead of forge, whichever) and it was wonderful. One of my favorite pieces was simply two objects mounted side-by-side on a board: a needle-point projectile nosecone that had been cut at the Bureau and a chunk of some raw metal ore that was rough yet beautifully angled with the crystalline structure of the metal. The juxtapostion was ... in a word - art. He was always delighted that he knew the precise equartion for the curve that was lathed out of the solid metal to produce the nosecone.
He also had a little (maybe 9 inch tall) sculpture of a dragon carrying a lance in its mouth. In his world, the knight was not the winner. He was a wonderful, wonderful person and one of those friends I miss regularly. I'm sure you have them too.

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