Roberto Delgado, journeyman. Some of the things I'm currently thinking and writing about: Design Thinking, Spirit of Craft, Homelife, Philosophy of Self.
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Visit to Hatch Show Print - Nashville, TN
Hatch Show Print in downtown Nashville is a place of magic. The concern with visual excellence in this place goes back over one hundred years to 1879, but it’s overall aesthetic from floor to ceiling is in-your-face contemporary.
“Hatch Show Print,” reads the shop’s elegant promo flyer, “is America’s oldest working poster print shop and is now the guardian of a very special corner of Americana.”
I could barely contain my excitement last week upon walking into this place, alone worth the two hour trip that my brother Kevin and I made from Chattanooga to Nashville.
Upon entering you notice how every square inch of wall space is adorned with a masterpiece in poster design. Not only was I reminded of the bold artistry that the poster as medium lends itself to, I was also humbled by the way in which these masters continue to apply the obsolete method of letterpress printing to this same medium. All I gotta say is that they churn out some powerful examples of robust visual communication from this little shop.
As I told one of their venerable designers, “your cat Huey has the right idea. He’s just chillin’ in his corner of the shop because he knows he’s part of something special, and he’s got nothing to prove.”
Eating at Sol Food in San Rafael, CA
The first thing you notice when you walk up to Sol Food is the color. The walls are painted bright, neon green - the equivalent in wall paints of a nice slap in the face.
The second thing you notice is a hand written letter encased in the menu box by the front door. In the later dated October 2006, two years after the opening, Angelo admonishes Mrs. Hernandez to change the color of her restaurant calling it “ugly and garish” and “appropriate for Puerto Rico, but not for Marin.”
As a Puerto Rican transplant living in California (the land of tolerance), I’ve come to relish the reputation that Puerto Ricans have for being loud. The paint is a small signal that amid the otherwise tame surroundings of Marin, some Boricua had the guts to bring a conga to a city council meeting, so to speak.
Go through the door, get a whif and take a look at the people, what they’re eating and how they’re eating, you’ll know that you’re about to have a damn good meal.
We went there for lunch last saturday. I had the Bistec encebollado with a generous side of rice and pink beans (garnished with pimento stuffed green olives), two tostones with garlic mojo and a simple salad dressed with a vinagrette. Well it was freakin’ amazing.
After lunch I walked over to La Bodega right next door where the operation continues. Here they feature fresh Rotisserie chicken, full on espresso machine to make café con leche, refrigerators with Malta (a carbonated beverage made from molasses, aka mother’s milk), and other goodies from the island (Goya products!) that are hard to come by in this neck of the woods.
I may be biased but, judging by the abandon with which I saw people eating, this is one of the best restaurants in the Bay Area.
Smoke Free. Day 2.
Been smoking for 6 years; decided to quit two days ago. While it’s hard to pin point a cause for my picking up the habit, it most definetely has something to do with grad school stress, etc. It’s also difficult to pin point the cause for my decision to quit, but it has something to do with cleaning out my closet (literally) and finding an expired box of nicotine patches amid the things I was ready to throw out. That’s it. No grand schemes or life affirming revelations. I’m abiding by the mantra of all former addicts out there and just “taking it day by day.”
I’m not the type to wax poetical about things, but something about the major chemical imbalance is messing with my mind. Here’s something that I jotted down today after my second cup of coffee at Starbucks (note: I’m also a caffeine addict, but I’m treating each cup of coffee as a reward for one less cig):
I’ve never felt this way. It’s as if my brain is drowning. I’m not irritable, thanks, I’m sure, to the 21 milligrams of nicotine seeping into my bloodstream from the nicotine patch on my arm. But I’m not happy either. I haven’t smoked a cigarette in 48 hours, and it feels as if the space around me is full of Jell-O and I’m trapped in it. When I move, when I even think about moving, I have to fight my way through the Jell-O. Maybe day 3 will feel different.
Looking for Art in All the Wrong Places
(For Chris)
By Roski Deluge
It’s becoming harder to keep track of the things that fall under the banner of art these days, since they continue to multiply at a pace far surpassing anything that Andy Warhol and his disciples could’ve imagined. And some would argue that it’s precisely this bloated-ness that dissipates the strength of art. Others, I’m sure, celebrate the growing accessibility of art and shun, as depicted in the film Who The #$&% is Jackson Pollock?, the rampant elitism that art matters can spark.
The boundary between art and life is more porous than we frequently realize. Writer Philip K. Dick dedicated his entire career to exploring this boundary. He writes:
What kind of person would write about something that he knows doesn’t exist, and how can something that doesn’t exist have aspects? But then I realized that I’d been writing about these matters for over twenty-five years. I guess there is a lot of latitude in what you can say when writing about a topic that does not exist. A friend of mine once published a book called Snakes of Hawaii. A number of libraries wrote him ordering copies. Well, there are no snakes in Hawaii. All the pages of his book were blank.
Perhaps art is itself that curious activity which only exists as a process. A process engaged with ways to visualize and feel the latent grammar of things. The German idealist philosopher Hegel called it “the silent weaving of the spirit,” by which he meant to describe, as I understand it, the elusive social process that allows us to be guided by something that essentially doesn’t exist.
Art is the process by which the silent weaving becomes a tapestry that makes tangible the intangible. The pragmatist philosopher John Dewey believed that art is essentially an engaged form of experience. He writes, “Because experience is the fulfillment of an organism in its struggles and achievements in a world of things, it is art in germ. Even in its rudimentary forms, it contains the promise of that delightful perception which is aesthetic experience.”
This perspective seems simple enough. Art is just experience with an aesthetic twist. Reduced to this form, a sort of radical egalitarianism which eliminates the mystique from the process as well as the result of art, suggests that perhaps we ought to look for art in all the wrong places.
With some of these ideas in mind, I was recently captivated by the photo blog Things Organized Neatly. The site is an archive of photographs of things organized neatly by people from all over the world. It becomes quite addictive to follow, precisely for its concern for the ultra mundane: kitchen utensils arranged in perfect symmetry, rows of pennies in various states of green fungal decay, milk crates forming a pyramid in a corner of a warehouse somewhere, and so on. What is going on here? Why have people embraced something that’s been characterized as a haven for OCD types?
Or consider the equally addicting and slightly subversive Facebook group, The Lying Down Game. The idea here is simple, and anyone can play. You pick a place, ideally one with many people going about their business with single minded purpose. At an appropriate moment of your choosing, you lie down (not necessarily on the ground, it can be any surface provided you can lie down on it) as if you were “vertically challenged.” If you brought your friend along, they can take a picture of you lying supine along with the miffed faces of curious onlookers, which will then serve as a testament to your small act of creative subversion.
I think what’s best about the mindset expressed by the examples above is the belief that there is, as Dewey states, “an esthetic quality” to life as it is even when it’s strange, ordinary, and mundane, precisely because it’s strange, ordinary, and mundane.
Art critics may dismiss the examples I’ve listed because they rely on satire and parody for their effect. There’s certainly a satirical side to the practices above that seems to encourage participants to deliberately take things out of context just for the fun of it. Yet to the extent that we don’t live in a humorless world, practices which fuse art and life, practices that invite us to learn new ways, however modest or trivial, to experience the world anew express, I think, deep humanitarian values. With these new forms of art practice that are gaining traction both in and out of the art world, what were once considered avantgarde activities for the select have become handy tools which anyone can use to build up the conceptual density of their world.
Whether organizing the detritus around my apartment on my kitchen table counts as art or not, the fact remains that I’m touching, feeling, and arranging things that I probably would’ve just ignored. It would be way too New Agey of me to say that the secret is in the process, better to say plainly that there is no secret, it’s all process. In any case, perhaps what I’ve been calling a new form of art above doesn’t deserve to be called art. And it’ll go the way of instant oblivion as most Internet fads. Even so, I think there’s something there, even if just the simple reminder that, in art as in life, the great quandary remains, how to make the self evident evident.
Getting reacquainted with the objects around me. Thanks Things Organized Neatly.
Admiring the presentation of my much awaited birthday gift: handcrafted, leather wallet from BillyKirk.
