Quick update
On the Fourth, wandered over to a party at a friend's place for a couple hours, then realized I still hadn't recharged my social batteries from last weekend's social extravaganza, so went home. Declined later invitation to join a small subset of that party's attendants for fireworks. Considered wandering over to fireworks on my own—there's some good ones within a half-hour walk or a ten-minute bike ride, if my bike's tires were pumped up—but was being productive and wasn't really feeling up to going out (I'm pretty much a hermit at heart) so I stayed home.
Worked at home on Friday. Declined another invitation to go do social stuff with a bunch of people I don't know.
Yesterday, Kam and Peggy and I drove up to the City (San Francisco, for those reading from somewhere other than the Bay Area (the San Francisco Bay Area, that is)) to meet up with Tamara (who's about to leave the city, the state, and the country to embark upon a new professorship; I thought she left a month ago, so I was delighted to get one more chance to see her before she left) to go see Rivers and Tides, a documentary about Andy Goldsworthy that's playing at the Roxie Cinema in SF through July 16. (There's a bunch of Goldsworthy's stuff online, but most of it looks unauthorized; but for a brief authorized taste, see the Smithsonian Magazine article. Or you can go buy one of his books from Amazon.) Goldsworthy's art is amazing—I've never seen anything else like it.
I'm afraid that even after the documentary, I still find his commentary on his work kinda pretentious, and he never talks about certain key aspects of it (like color, and the use of sharp boundaries, and the fact that a lot of what makes his work so startling is that it's not natural, that he's using totally natural materials to construct something that could only have been made by a human). Also, halfway through the movie I suddenly became exhausted (long day, warm dark room, soothing music and voice, long periods of no words at all), and for the second half of the movie I was drifting off every few seconds. I would still highly recommend seeing the movie, though; it shows two things very clearly that are hard to see in the remarkable books of photos of Goldsworthy's art. First, the fact that almost all of his pieces are very ephemeral—ice sculptures constructed just before sunrise, stone structures constructed at low tide that will be completely covered by high tide, and so on. Those factors are commented on in the photo books, but you don't get nearly as visceral a sense of them until you see it on screen, or at least I didn't. And second, the fact that he has to make multiple attempts to construct many of his structures—or to put it another way, that he knows ahead of time that he's likely to not just fail, but fail repeatedly, before he's done. Watching one of his stone egg structures fall apart as he builds it, more than once, gives me a whole new paradigm about art, and that's not something that happens every day.
Before the movie, we spent a couple hours at the California Academy of Sciences looking at their Skulls exhibit. Lots and lots of very cool stuff; unfortunately, the exhibit itself isn't so well designed. (Mostly, I think, that's due to the clear fact that the people who chose the skulls to display and wrote the accompanying text were not the same people who did the physical layout of the exhibit, so you get a card saying "This skull blah blah blah" which is located across the display case from, or in extreme cases across the room from, the skull in question.) I might not have noticed the design flaws so much were it not for the fact that Peggy and Kam work at science museums, and are happy to critique such stuff, which always brings out the critic in me. (This is another relatively new paradigm for me; it wasn't until I started visiting art museums with Fran (who's on her way to a Ph.D. in Art History) a few years ago that it occurred to me that there were choices to be made in how to display stuff at a museum, and that the people who made those choices might not do the best possible job of it.) Still, despite the flaws I highly recommend the exhibit. I almost bought a little six-inch-long cast of a sea turtle skull from their store, but $60 was slightly more than I wanted to pay for it, and it's not like I don't have enough tchotchkes anyway. And, really, it didn't look quite as alien as sea turtle skulls usually do. If it had, I'd have bought it.
After the movie, we sat around Tamara's totally empty apartment for a couple hours. I was still totally wiped out, barely coherent. I probably should've tried to take a nap, but I thought hearing people talking and laughing in the next room would've kept me from sleeping. We eventually had dinner at a little crepes-and-Moroccan-food cafe nearby (not the famed Ti Couz, though only a block or two from there), and then drove home. I probably wasn't really awake enough to drive entirely safely, but I thought I was, and conversation kept me from fading much. (I should note that I wasn't particularly unsafe; no close calls or anything like that. Just not as alert as would be ideal when one is driving, and my reaction time and decision-making capabilities were probably not entirely up to snuff.)
Got home, stumbled into bed around 11:30 p.m., which is unheard-of early for Jeds in these parts. Don't know why so exhausted, especially since Wednesday and Thursday nights I got more sleep than I've had in ages. Friday night was only 5 or 6 hours, but that's what I've been getting by on for weeks, so I don't know why that would've been a problem.
Anyway. Today is an SH day. Lots of reading, lots of editing.