Locked Out

Once I shut the door I knew I was fucked. I was on the outside, and the only copy of the apartment key was inside. The key was on a special plastic handle so i hadn’t put it on my key chain. I went to the reception and asked if they had an extra key and the super even checked his office in the basement. No dice. I had to call a locksmith. You call a locksmith and then they page a roaming technician to come by to give a quote. It’s like a stupid dispatcher-roving technician drug dealing like system.

As I was waiting, the super came up to console me. I told him I couldn’t believe I made such a dumb mistake. I was on my way to pick up lunch and absent mindedly left the key on the dining table. I asked him how much he thought lock replacement cost... he said he didn’t know but he knew a woman who was fleeced $1700 in another building. Great.

I got a crazy idea. Since I had unlocked the patio door to provide some air while I was woodcutting, I knew it was open. I also knew the building has a series of terracing balconies. I asked the super if he had a ladder. He did. At that moment the locksmith arrived. A lanky Israeli in jeans with a gauze bandage on his hand. At the door I asked him how much... he said “how much you want to pay”. I say 100. Like a fucker he says “usually I drill a lock out that’s 115 and then I charge another 245 to install a new lock. The lock can’t be picked it’s automatic.” 15 minutes earlier I had tried in vain sliding a plastic card to open it. The Israeli made a hard sell. He calls his boss talks in Hebrew and says “250 in cash and I’ll do it for you now.”

Just then, the super came down the hallway, I told the Israeli I wanted to try scaling the ladder before dropping $250. He probably never saw a cheaper guy in his life. Climbing down from 16th floor balconies to avoid locksmith fees? We went to the apartment above. Fancy apartment with authentic Marilyn Monroe Warhol silkscreen paintings on the wall and we were weaving a 10 foot ladder over the kitchen island and fancy furniture.

Going to the balcony edge we dangled the ladder down but it was too short by about 3 feet. Shit. I was resigned to paying 250. The super told me the floor below the apartment may have a shorter floor to floor height. Riding the elevator between the 16th and 14th floors the super says, “at least it’s an interesting day!” For staff, it was exciting to figure out how to break into apartments. So we set up the ladder on the lower balcony but again it was about 3 feet too short. At this point, in times of potential financial loss I got an idea. There were a couple flimsy wicker tables and a metal plate. I said, why don’t we stack the wickers, put a protective sheet metal plate on top to prop the ladder up without having the ladder punch through the wicker. We rotate the wicker stack 45 degrees to fit the ladder on the diagonal and voila.

While we held the wicker baskets together so the whole rickety arrangement wouldn’t topple, the super safely climbed up the ladder over the guard rail and opened the door. I forgot to tell him to dodge the Japanese knives and my woodcut at the threshold. A day earlier I had gauged my big toe bloody on a knife. I had been carving a board of poplar to form an elm canopy silhouette for the past 2 weeks. Luckily the super opened the front door unscathed. He didn’t say anything but he must’ve wondered what arboreal transformations I had been working on.

Katsura Sunshine

The Art Student's League closed its doors today for the next month due to corona. no worries however as I brought my supplies home to print like a japanese... with wooden spoon pressing against the back of kitikata paper. in honor of  japanese culture, i'm posting about a rakugo, japanese storytelling performance i saw last fall.

Katsura sunshine's link to japan was greek theater. He produced aristophanes' clouds in toronto for 15 months. During his research, he found an article that listed similarities between greek theater and japanese kabuki theater. He went there for 6 months to explore this connection and ended up staying for 20 years. in order to become a rakugo story teller, one has to be accepted by a rakugo master and train for 3 years. you clean the master's house daily, do their laundry, fold their kimonos. Imagine a world where an accomplished master gives you their last name passed down for generations, welcomes you into his family, trains you as a comedian, teaches you stories he was taught from his master, puts you onstage as his warm-up act, is available to teach and advise as long as you both are living, and never takes a single yen of payment. this is the world of rakugo.

Katsura sunshine came onto the stage with bright j pop blasting from the speakers and knelt in front of dozens of lit candles. He is the only western rakugo performer in the world... this was the first rakugo performance I had seen outside of the witness testimonies in rashomon. I didn’t know what to expect, or understand how different his rakugo would be from traditional rakugo.

"Good evening I am a traditional Japanese Rokugo Storyteller in my name is Katsura Sunshine those of you who are seeing this for the first time raise your hands, those of you who have seen rakugo before, raise your hands. those of you who just are too tired to raise your hands please raise your hands.

For people that have never seen this before, we start with a little bit of an explanation. we use only two props in Japanese we call this a senzu or fan and this a te negui, or hand towel. In rokugo, we must kneel a long time.. in english we call this 'punishment' Rakugo is Japanese form of Storytelling. story telling art has been passed down for 400 years from Master to apprentice in lasting friendship through the ages.”

"I would like try 2 very very short stories for you so you can get used to the kind of stories we tell. The first story I'm going to tell you now is 15 seconds long."

Two ladies gossiping in front of their house in the neighborhood in Old Edo Japan.

"Did you hear mrs. Takahashi down the street fell down on her face and her face became completely disfigured"

" oh really that's too bad"

" yes but the doctor was amazing he managed to put her face right back together the way it was before"

"oh really... that's too bad”

The audience laughed inappropriately.

He then proceeded to tell another funny story, priming the audience to get a feel for the rakugo punchline. “This is the situation in the hospital that my Japanese friends tell me about today. in Japan Japanese elderly people off and go to the hospital not because they are sick but because they want to meet their friends and socialize.” Katsura sunshine now acts out 2 different characters in dialogue.

"Mizayaki, long time no see in the hospital waiting room"

"I'm sorry I couldn't come last week I was sick"

"how do you feel now?"

"much better thank you."

"I'm glad you're feeling better. can you tell us what happened?

"I thought I was going to die today what does my forehead it hurt I touch my nose it hurt and I touched my chin I touch my chest and I touch my hips and I touched my leg and everywhere it hurt. “

"what did the doctor say?

"the doctor said to me do not worry this is not the problem"

"what do you mean this is not a problem"

"it is not a problem, sir you simply have a broken finger"

The audience laughed more.

Then Katsura sunshine proceeded to tell a personal tale. “I tell you this evening to start off I almost died 2 years ago.” The audience nervously laughs. “there's a funny story attached to it and maybe you've heard a rumor of this economy class syndrome. I took a plane to Tokyo a couple years ago. what happened is that I was very exhausted... all my flight home I slept from New York to Tokyo. it's about 14 hours and I slept 13 and 1/2 of the 14 hours I think my legs were in a funny position.

When I got back from New York to Tokyo the next week I was supposed to fly from Tokyo to London and then to Edinboro to do 4 weeks of performances of rock and roll at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and then go to London and start a show at the West end. immediately when I got back to Tokyo I felt a little exhausted and I felt an aching pain in my leg. lt feels like when you exercise too much... but I here's a clue that something was wrong— I do not exercise.. and if I felt a muscle pain because of exercising you would think it would have affected both legs.

I am not someone to go to the doctor... in fact, I never go to the doctor. But I met my best friend and drinking buddy named Miyama and he is a famous back surgeon in Japan. He told me he never had experience with these types of problems but he works at a university hospital and told me just in case, come by and have it checked out.

I think I was fine but when you are planning to board a plane i felt I should play it safe. At worst, I would talk with miyama and get a drink together. After he did some tests on me, he looked grave and told me, “You definitely have blood clots “ you should sit down because we don't know where they are... there's no way we can determine where they are unless we do a CT scan just wait here best thing is not to move not anywhere else. Oh and by the way, your liver and kidneys are fine.”

He had me sit in a wheelchair and the next day I had a CT scan. They give you a little bit of like a liquid and it starts by heating up your head and then heats up your body. I was thinking you know if I wasn't getting a CT scan, I would actually like to have this liquid at dinner sometimes.

In the emergency room they told me you have blood clots in your legs. They told me to lie in a stretcher. 2 days prior I had been walking, now I was in a stretcher. In the hospital everyone knew I was a comedian so they would come up to me with their jokes.

The first doctor said, “You’re lucky you didn't get on that plane to go to the UK you know because get on the plane and the blood clots can move around you could have died.”

Ha ha, very funny I thought. Then the second doctor stopped by and said, “you're lucky you didn't get on that plane because if the blood clot didn’t kill you then you would have been killed for sure by the UK cuisine.”

These Japanese have a deadpan sense of humor. Finally the senior doctor comes in and I thought he would be serious since all the other doctors were taking notes. “He is very very fortunate and very very lucky. It just shows you how you can be saved by early prevention he is so lucky to have chosen the right drinking partner dr. Miyama.

I love the nurses in Japan, most nurses have chosen the wrong career and they should have been stand up comedians. One day my friend came in and was horrified to see me in a stretcher with tubes all over me. The nurse joked with her “life goes by fast and before you know it, you die”

I missed my Edinboro festival performances, but after I survived my near death experience I decided to put on a show at the hospital a couple months after my discharge to thank all the doctors and nurses.

“They made an amazing advertising poster for the event... better than a graphic designer poster. They had a photo of me, and a perfect catch phrase in Japanese saying “come to the sunshine for your health!! You'll die laughing”

After the lighthearted vignettes, Katsura sunshine’s mood turned dark and reflective. “After a death experience one thinks about life in a different way. One thinks about one’s fortune and life. He proceeded to tell a modernized Shinigami story. The shinigami (shin=death kami=spirit) story is a traditional tale, about their god death. A man who is fed up with his life prepares to commit suicide. Before he could do so, however, he is visited by a Shinigami, who tells him that his time has not yet come. When a rakugo storyteller changes characters he does so very quickly, portraying the essential attributes of the character. For the shinigami, katsura sunshine leans forward in old age and looks as if he is hobbling on a cane. To play himself, he straightens his back and has an expression of a youthful man - like Lloyd from dumb and dumber. The Shinigami also explains that each life is measured on a candle, and once the flame burns out, the person dies. This shows that the Shinigami have no control over who lives and dies. To stop the man from committing suicide, the Shinigami tells him an easy way to make money. The man is told that he could pretend to be a doctor who could cure any form of disease. By speaking some magic words, a Shinigami can be forced back into the underworld, thus lengthening a person’s life. The man is also informed that this would only work if the Shinigami is sitting at the foot of the bed. If the Shinigami is sitting at the head of the bed, however, it means that the sick person must die. Using this new found knowledge, the man grew very rich. When he saw the shinigami at the foot of the bed he would say the incantation, the family of the person would pay him thinking he saved their loved one’s life.

One day, the man is called to a house to cure someone. When he enters, he sees that the Shinigami is sitting on the head of patient’s bed, indicating that death was certain. The family pleaded and begged, and offered him a 15,0000 dollars. Consumed by greed, the man decides to take a risk, and when the Shinigami dozes off, he quickly orders 4 of the man’s relatives to switch the orientation of the patient’s bed, thus saving his life.

The Shinigami is obviously unhappy with what he did, and when the man reaches home, it criticizes him for his disobedience. The Shinigami then changes his tone, and suggest that they go out for a drink to celebrate his earnings. The man falls for the trick, and the Shinigami brings him to a building that is filled with candles. The Shinigami then shows the man his candle, which is nearly burnt out as a result of what he had just done. The shinigami tells the man? He has never seen a man give up his life for an exact sum of money (15,000 dollars). The man is then offered a chance to extend his life by transferring the wick and wax of his candle to another’s. The man fails in this attempt, as he drops his candle and dies. At this point Katsura sunshine bows down as if dying and all the candles go out on stage. This was a very serious and unexpected disquieting undisney ending. Katsura sunshine had taken us on a journey... with the power of rakugo... shown ideas and dialogue transition and bounce from character to character from the very lighthearted fantasy to he autobiographical to the deadly serious and philosophical within the span of an hour.

Woodcut and Pandemic

Like corona virus, woodcut printing originated in china before it became viral. back in 220 AD the chinese first used wood cuts to print flowers on silk. like corona, woodcut technology spread through europe then japan then america. i printed my first 'corona' plant today. the process was unexpected. 

step 1: procure a set of chisels

 step 2: cut wood

step 3: check the print by making a rubbing with crayon and tracing paper

step 4: soak the paper in a shallow basin of water for an hour. damp paper apparently 

absorbs ink better. 

step 5: while waiting for the paper to absorb moisture, adjust the pressure of the printing press by rotating the spindles. 

step 6: in sending the woodcut through the press sandwiched in newsprint paper and a blanket, the pressure should be adjusted so as to squeeze the wood cut firmly to ensure the ink is transferred to the paper effectively. 

step 7: once the pressure has been gauged, start rolling the ink out on a glass table with a brayer. the ink should be rolled out thin and smooth so when it is rolled on the woodcut it's smooth, without inconsistencies, lumps, or bubbles.

step 8: start blotting out the wet paper to dry with newsprint. use a rolling pin to get excess water out. place the paper with its watermark facing the woodcut block. 

step 9: send the block through the press with the paper. 

step 10: additional prints can be made without inking. this prints are called 'ghosts', as they come out gray in tone. hang the prints on a clothesline to dry.

Doors and Pandemic (Duomo Part 3)

viruses not only spawn febreezing asians in subways, hoarding toilet paper and hand sanitizer, but they also have the ability to drive serious artistic endeavors...some of which become viral themselves and spawn ideas. trying to make sense of one's own mortality and meaning in life leads to expression and creation. it's no coincidence the black plague sparked the renaissance and some of the most memorable art and architecture. today's post centers on the famous virus-inspired baptistry doors in florence.

the Rivalry 

Brunelleschi had no ambitions to follow his father’s footsteps as a notary in Florence, instead, at the age of 15, he began an apprenticeship as a goldsmith. Goldsmiths at that time covered a variety of arts such as decorating books with gold leaf, setting precious stones, casting metals, engraving silver and working with enamel. Donatello, da Vinci, and vercocchio are other notable artists who started their artistic training in goldsmith workshops. Brunelleschi quickly mastered goldsmithing and started to study motion through the design of gears and wheels. He is reported to have made the first alarm bell and a spring powered clock (innovations that were hundreds of years before their time).

In 1402, at the age of 25, Brunelleschi entered the famous competition for the bronze doors of the Baptistry of San Giovanni which was sited across from the duomo. The competition which would play a critical role in Brunelleschi’s life came about as the result of the Black Plague. Throughout the 1300s the Black Plague struck Florence. In 1400, 12,000 florentines died (20% of the population). Every time the plague struck, the Florentines would try to drive it away by either ringing church bells, or marching the portrait of the virgin through the streets, or burning sulfur wormwood, juniper to clear the air. To appease the deity this time, the Guild of the Cloth merchants sponsored a competition for the bronze doors housing the font where all the citizens were baptized. 34 judges were chosen including artists, sculptors, and banker Giovanni Medici.

Each entrant was given four slabs of bronze weighing 75 pounds and ordered to execute the same scene, abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac to symbolize florence’s survival from the plague. The competitors were given 1 year to complete the task and the final design was to be 17 inches high by 13 inches wide. The process for casting bronze is conceptually the same today as 600 years ago. Today a bronze sculpture is made with wax, and then coated with a cementitious slurry material. The wax is burned out, leaving a hollow form to pour the bronze in. The process is called the ‘lost wax’ process. One year may seem like a long time to administer a bronze casting competition but 600 years ago, the slurry material was comprised of ox horn, iron filings and cow dung. The casting process was so complex and fraught with difficulty back then that when Michelangelo used to cast bronze, he would request a Mass to be said.

Out of the 7 entrants, Lorenzo Ghiberti arose to be Brunelleschi’s main challenger... and a life-long hated rival. Ghiberti was very different in his work process than Brunelleschi. He would seek out advice from the jurors, and adjust and change his sculpture entry accordingly. Brunelleschi worked in isolation. Always suspicious of others stealing his ideas, if he did make notes, he would use a cipher to hide their meaning. Da Vinci would later do the same by employing backwards handwriting in his notebooks. Ghiberti’s entry was made with 2 pours while brunelleschi’s entry was comprised of over 30 pieces soldered together. People today can decide which entrant they would’ve preferred as the original competition entries from Brunelleschi and Ghiberti can now be seen in Museo nazionale del bargello. The judges had a hard time declaring a clear winner between Brunelleschi and Ghiberti so they offered them a joint commission. Brunelleschi refused to pair up with Ghiberti and cede any design control. In frustration, Brunelleschi renounced his work in sculpture and never worked in bronze ever again and left Florence for Rome for the next 16 years of his life. Ghiberti would spend the next 22 years of his life working on the bronze doors that would weigh 10 tons. In the lives of the artist by Vasari, Ghiberti’s doors were named the Gates of Paradise by Michelangelo because of their beauty. Michelangelo was impressed by their illusion of space. Although they were cast relatively flat, they employed mathematical perspective principles to create a 3 dimensional sense of space. The doors were also technically materially advanced. Ghiberti used a special bronze alloy that was especially receptive to gilding. He mixed gold dust and mercury and painted it onto the bronze alloy to create a smooth flowing finish suggesting air and atmosphere. This highly toxic process involved burning the mercury away to leave only the gold in place.

Competition entries - Brunelleschi (left) vs Ghiberti (right)

Ghiberti's Baptistry Doors

i mistakenly had an eight foot long board of poplar cut into 1 foot x 1 foot square pieces. i lamented my mistake (the japanese woodcut artists i admire never used squares). design within squares is hard to make dynamic, but i figured, if ghiberti could work with the square, 'what the heck' i could try too. my latest woodcut efforts will be a series of square format prints that i will tape to my front door in response to covid-19. 

square #1 - corona plant: small yet viral 

Woodcutting and Pandemic (Part 2)

you know your building has hit the big time when it's featured in the new york post. (bigtime)

you would think working on the 8th floor of a building whose lower 7 floors are closed due to corona virus would be troubling. for those of you not in this situation, imagine what a chicken feels like sitting atop an egg... just waiting for corona to hatch. that's what i feel like. not terribly exciting. with all the news about corona virus that's been circulating, i figured it would be fun to play a game of "what's dumber?" to keep our minds off the impending doom.

Question 1 : what's dumber?
A. allowing butchering and eating pangolins and bats at wet markets that harbor vector jumping viruses? or
B. spraying an asian man with febreeze in the subway? (febreezed asian)

Question 2: what's dumber?
A. gagging doctors and researchers of their scientific findings of a potential deadly outbreak in december and proceeding with an annual potluck dinner for 40,000 families? or
B. warning its nation's citizens of a viral outbreak and risking a small economic dip and ruined new year?

Question 3: what's dumber?
A. quarantining a cruise ship with a few passengers infected with corona to try to maximize infections and deaths? or
B. removing healthy passengers before they get infected?

Question 4: what's dumber?
A. believing the governor who's been telling the public not to panic and that corona is not that infectious and driving a sick friend to the hospital and getting infected? ('difficult' transmission) or
B. stockpiling toilet paper and canned goods?

Question 5: what's dumber?
A. going to work, to retrieve blocks of wood stored under my desk for printmaking despite the threat of corona? or
B. working from home?

If you've answered A to any of the questions, don't worry, you're as dumb as large national governments and a daft architect. join me in my printmaking efforts. i've started a night class at the art student's league. to answer my previous post's comment, there's nothing more exciting than carving a piece of wood with a knife for hours and hours in self-quarantine.

Branching out

i've always been interested in how architects find their calling. sometimes they start out pursuing completely different career tracks such as dentistry (richard rogers), boxing (tadao ando), film making (koolhaas), or psychology (jim polshek)... something interesting occurs when people change course and bring different perspectives to architecture. Einstein labeled the thought process that facilitated his creativity “combinatory play.” Similar to a child experimenting with a new Lego set, Einstein would combine and recombine seemingly unrelated ideas, concepts, and images to produce new, original discoveries. Think about it: All new ideas are merely the combination of existing ideas in one form or another. E=mc² is a great example. Einstein was not the first to discover the concepts of energy, mass or the speed of light; rather, he combined them in a novel way, and in the process altered how we view the universe.

in studying masters in combinatory play to refine my own learning process i became interested in how one particular nobel laureate physicist, steven chu, branched from physics to biology. you'll often hear him quote yankees catcher, yogi berra to disarm the audience to start off lectures. "Well, Yogi is one of my heroes. He's the great American philosopher of the twentieth century. One of the things he said is, "You can see a lot by watching." He said other wonderful things like, "If you come to a fork in the road, take it." Or, "We may be lost, but we're making great time."

but don't let chu's humor fool you. there's something serious to his playful learning process. In one such lecture, chu spoke about why some people achieve more than others "I've always been curious what separates students in graduate school. At graduate school at Stanford, you have some of the best students in the world, who you can see are going to go on and become world-class scientists, and who are very smart and are going to be good. But the thing that really differentiates among them is this passion to find out what the answer is: "I'm not going to quit." After those prerequisites, the thing that separates the people who are going to excel from people who are good and not, is that internal drive.

"Maybe it goes back to my high school days, when I was not such a good student. In actual fact, if one wants to go into a new area beyond your school days, you can pick up a classic textbook and begin to read, and begin to read in the literature; but it's not as much fun. When I was going into biology maybe a dozen years ago, I did try that. I picked up a big, fat tome called Biochemistry, a classic textbook. I started reading; it was 1,500 pages. I got to page 150, and I was deciding, "Well, it's beginning to slip out of my head as fast as it's going in now." I reached a "steady state!" So I said, "Well, this isn't going to work." So I would look around, and I had some knowledge from reading newspapers and magazines such as Science, Science Times, The New York Times, Scientific American, things of that nature. I had an interest in these biological problems, and I would pick something that I was interested in. But, of course, since I wasn't an expert in biology, I didn't know, "Is this a stupid question? Is this a deep question? What?" I would say, "Well, I think I can do something here and I have some interest." So I'd trot over to the biology department or medical school and say, "Is this something we're studying? I think I want to do this." And they would tell me sometimes, "No, no, it's silly," or "It's been done before." Or sometimes they'd say, "This is a central problem in biology." That rarely happened.

"But what happened is then I would start to collaborate with these people who spent their career in this specialty, and who grew up in this culture. They would say, "You should read this article, and that article, and that article." We would talk, and it was wonderful to learn that way. So you could sort of leapfrog over the years of school. Now to be sure, I'm not pretending I have as broad or deep as knowledge of that. But you start with a little, thin sliver of a particular problem, and you start to build knowledge around that thin sliver. By the time you've done the experiment and you're starting to write the paper, you better have some knowledge of what's around, because you won't even get to publish in the paper if you haven't referenced the right people or the precursors before you. But it's learning in that way.