02004-09-06 | Uncategorized
Listening: Ken Wilber + Deepak Chopra conversation (I-N)
Mood: engaged
Last night I came across an old quote by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who said that what was most important in modern art, architecture and design was very often what was left out.
Here is another great quote, by the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. He said: I don’t want to be interesting. I want to be good.
Those two views can work hand in hand. Leave out what is superficial, leave out what is merely interesting until at last you arrive at the good design/music/architecture etc….
My favorite part of the Wilber-Chopra conversation is where Deepak Chopra talks about the decaying and putrefied body of the caterpillar feeding an entirley new body…. and turning into a butterfly. Could that be metaphor for the struggle the world is going through at present?
02019-05-15 | Ottmar
The loft was on the fourth floor of an old industrial building in the South End of Boston, near the Orange line, that stretch where it was elevated before diving underground. The monthly rent was between $600 and $700, I can’t remember whether it was 625 or 675, and electricity and heat were included. However, the heat only worked from Monday morning to Friday evening, the working hours of an industrial building. Weekends were rough during the cold New England winters. One could stay in bed under the covers reading and I did that a lot. Another option was visiting friends. A girlfriend with a warm apartment was great, too.
I had 3,750 square feet of raw space with access to the roof, via something that was more substantial than a ladder but less solid than stairs. Being able to climb to the roof was great and I would often sit on the asphalt roof with a cup of tea, or to meditate.
I learned how to solder copper tubing that year, because the loft had a toilet and a tiny sink, but that was all. Through ads in a local paper I found a used water heater, an old claw-footed bathtub, and a beautiful and huge sink made from Vermont soapstone. That last item would be worth a fortune now. Dragging those things up to the fourth floor was hard!
I bought copper tubing and two by fours. From the wood I fashioned a stand for the soapstone sink and with the copper I connected the sink to the water outlet. I found a couple of pallets on the street and dragged them up to the loft. I placed the bathtub on top of the pallets so I would be able to look out of the window while taking a bath. There was only sky in that window. Below there was a baseball field that was rarely used. I connected the huge water heater to the water supply and the water heater to the faucets of the bathtub.
Since the loft was right under the roof, there were a number of leaks that sprang up during the heaviest summer rain showers. I would grab the few pots and pans I owned and place them under the leaks. Sometimes I needed more containers and a bucket, a salad bowl, even a mug would do. Of course I had to remember that the mug had to be emptied more often. At times I would witness a surround sound symphony of drip sounds. Each container created a different pitch, and then the pitch would continue to change as the container filled up. The sound would also differ depending on whether the drops came directly from the ceiling or first ran along a pipe before they plunged down. Some drips were constant, some intermittent, some fell rapidly, some sailed down languidly… Depending on where I stood in the space I could hear different rhythms that were being created by the drips. For a more dramatic performance the rain storm might add the occasional thunder.
This is something worth remembering, because there is something to be learned from allowing so many leaks to become something quite beautiful, rather than feeling upset or overwhelmed by them. Drips can be a nightmare or a wonder.
I’ll look for some photos that can illustrate this post…
02019-04-02 | Uncategorized
The reason I started making bread at home was simple: I could not find decent bread where I live. Having grown up surrounded by bakeries, and with fresh rolls and crusty sourdough bread a staple that could be counted on when I came home from school, this was a problem for me. There were so many neighborhood bakeries that my family became very discerning… we would go to this bakery for the freshest little bread rolls, to that one for the best large sourdough loaves, and preferred a third one for sweet items.
A baker told me that it wasn’t possible to make bread in a home oven, because the dough needed steam to develop a soft crumb, and home ovens expel humidity. Professional ovens were designed to contain humidity and have a mechanism to inject steam to create the perfect crumb. For decades I believed this to be true and unhappily made do with the bread I found in local bakeries.
When I had lived without good bread for many years, I suddenly felt that the difference between a house and a home was… bread. The smell of bread was home. I searched the internet looking for a solution to baking bread in a home oven and five years ago I discovered a book by an American baker. The book was called Tartine and it discribed a method of using a Dutch oven to contain the moisture in the dough in order to create a soft crumb. After twenty minutes of baking one removed the top of the Dutch oven and the bread could then develop the dark crust.
According to the book’s instructions I mixed water and flour with my hand and waited patiently for it to attract that mixture of wild yeast and microbes that becomes the sourdough mother, that magical substance that makes the dough rise and which creates the beautiful airholes in the bread. Making bread is alchemy. By taking the most simple ingredients, water, flour and salt, and turning them into bread, one claims membership in humanity, for only humans use fire to create food. Breaking bread is a sign of making peace in many cultures. Sharing bread is a sign of making a stranger feel welcome.
I was lucky and the very first loaves turned out well enough. The house suddenly smelled like a home. Every Sunday morning I made dough and worked it from eight o’clock in the morning until about five in the afternoon, when I turned the oven on to bake. I discovered I loved the pace of making bread, which combines waiting with stretching and folding the dough every half hour. It felt right, this combination of doing and waiting, breathing in and exhaling, like growing plants or creating art… action followed by observation and contemplation.
I decided I had to share my bread and on Sundays I began to make four loaves. On Monday mornings I drove around town and delivered bread to my friends. I have done this for over five years now, having started in the Fall of 2013. Since January of 2014 I have documented the ingredients and measurements of every loaf. Loaves that are mostly white flour, loaves that are mostly whole wheat flour, loaves with lots of semolina, loaves with barley porridge, with brown rice porridge, black rice porridge, loaves with oatmeal, loaves with boiled potato slices, loaves with herbs, loaves with small chunks of cheese…
In time making bread has become part of me, like meditation and playing the guitar before, and today I cannot imagine my life without a weekly bread day, the day that starts with choosing ingredients from the cupboard, mixing them together with water and the leaven that was prepared the previous day. Bread day is punctuated by examining and turning the dough every half hour, and always culminates in turning on the oven and getting ready to bake. And by the end of that day my house always smells like a home.
02010-05-08 | Photos
I love it when classical critics become poets…
An earthquake in C major: Daniel Barenboim and the Berliners
The final chord of the Brahms is a case in point. On the page, this could hardly be a more familiar or a more simple musical idea – a fortissimo C major chord that the whole orchestra holds for a semibreve, the sort of thing you’ve heard hundreds, thousands, of times. But never like this. This was a gigantic upswelling of musical affirmation that seemed more like a force of nature than the conclusion to a mere symphony: an earthquake in C major. It was a sound that began somewhere in the bowels of creation and exploded up to the heights of the cosmos – or more prosaically, it started with the Berliner’s incomparable double-basses and took in everything and everyone up to Emmanuel Pahud’s flute part.
(Via Guardian Music)
On my list: to experience the Berlin Philharmonic in the flesh on their home turf.
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I was reading the news this Morning (((on the excellent Editor’s Choice iPad app from the NY Times))) while waking up for a phone interview, when I saw the image that leads this article:
Basics – Of Compost, Molecules and Insects, Art Is Born – NYTimes.com
…and I thought, well that’s nothing, wait until artists use genetics as their medium and create animals such as the one pictured for exhibitions. And where will we draw the line? No genetic manipulation in the name of art, period? Or, yes to genetic manipulation, but don’t grow the animal only to be killed and taxidermied so they can be presented in a gallery? Or, artistic genetic manipulation is OK as long as the total number of limbs does not exceed x number? Will sixteen year olds receive bio kits for christmas, you know basic ones for creating multiple heads on a fly or eyes on the back of a mouse? Don’t worry mom, the instructions say that it’ll only live for an hour…
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Very Personal Computing
Jean-Louis Gassée:
The center of financial gravity in the computing world—the Center of Money—has shifted. No longer directed at the PC, the money pump now gushes full blast at the smartphones market.
He backs this up with a striking financial comparison: Apple makes six times the profit from iPhone OS device sales than HP makes from PC sales — despite the fact that by unit sales, HP is the world’s leading PC maker, and Apple is not the leading smartphone maker.
(Via Daring Fireball)
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I have had the iPad since Monday Morning. Here are my first impressions:
The size is good. The screen is wonderful. Video looks fantastic. Email is nice and the keyboard is amazingly responsive. I don’t think I will need a “real” keyboard at all. My typing speed on the iPad is very comparable to my laptop. Web browsing is good, but I would prefer multiple tabs. I would also like the option of multiple user-accounts, which would make sharing the iPad with people on our tour bus easier. The battery-life is very impressive. The tablet is not heavy, but half the weight would be nice… (((of course I realize that this is simply not possible at present)))
I think that about 50% of the time when I would normally open my laptop, I will now reach for the iPad instead. Looking up definitions, checking email, watching a podcast, reading saved Instapaper articles, streaming Netflix – it’s nicer to curl up in a lounge chair with the iPad than with a laptop. I watched a movie in the evening, streaming via 3G AT&T on the Netflix app. Didn’t stutter once, and scrubbing forward worked as well.
I think this thingamajig will be a huge hit, I really do. I just wish we could afford to create an iPad/iPhone Ottmar-Backstage app that streams tons of music (((and in December it’ll automatically stream tunes from Winter Rose, of course))) has an auto-updating tour calendar, this journal, photo slideshows and so on..
02009-10-02 | Photos
Monday Morning I got up at 05:00 after an hour or two of sleep – I ended up reading for most of the night when I realized I could not fall asleep – I picked up Jon and we left his house at 06:30. From Albuquerque to Dulles airport and then across the puddle. Paris airport, 6AM. Pain au chocolat and black tea for me and a croissant and espresso for Jon. We arrived in Milan on Tuesday Morning at 10:35 and were at the hotel at 11:30. Rooms not available yet. Dead tired we left our luggage and walked around the corner and found an outdoor cafe, where we ate lunch, delicious paninis. More walking and back at the hotel to check in at 13:00.
Internet in the hotel is €17-22 per 24 hours. Highway robbery. I hope the Blue Note has wireless Internet acces and so I can try to upload photos there on Thursday.
In the afternoon I played guitar for a couple of hours. The first painless (((except for one jolt))) guitar practice since I sliced my finger 9 days ago. Tuesday Evening I walked around for a couple of hours and took a bunch of photos. Then I kept myself up, finishing the new Dan Brown novel, to move my body to the European schedule. Not a great book, but it does contain some interesting information, especially about D.C. and American history. A couple of Brown’s statements about Buddhism are plain wrong.
Here are some photos from the Tuesday Evening walk:
Wednesday Morning I took another walk. A cappuccino here and an espresso there. I like the area around the hotel a lot. Haven’t seen it on a map yet. Thought about the current era, the problems, the danger of climate change and then I thought about the middle ages and the plague and how desperate those times must have been. Especially how strange it was that so many people died simply because they believed and prayed. Churches were the biggest source of infection, because many people came together, and of course they all dipped their hands into the holy water… Every time has its own difficulty and challenge.
Back to the hotel and some work on the slideshow, which I think is still improving quite a bit. It is now about 2.6GB in size.
The Milanese tap water is wonderful! Either that or the hotel is filtering their tap water.
