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All moved in -- getting everything into the house was no problem, but for the studio . . . we had to use a shoehorn! At this point, we've proved it capable of doing everything we need to do - burning screens, printing, sewing, dyeing, packaging and storing. As one friend put it, "I'm just more efficient in small spaces." Being a true lover of modern style, I'm surprised by how fond I've become of the creaky, wavy floors, the sticky doors, the slight tilt to the whole place. Rudy the dog has learned to be a dog again, and he'll bask in the sunny spots for hours. The plants and vistas are different here, and it will all show up in the colors and images for Fall 2015. This little place feels like home. xoxox, p I don't cook much anymore, but I can make a salad in my sleep. Anyone who has broken bread in my company has probably tasted "Mitch's Salad," which is my family's go-to recipe. A friend of mind once said, "I think you have to like making salads," and I guess I do. You can't really rush it. Salad ingredients, in my mind, should be small and even, so the dressing coats evenly and so you don't have to go through the awkward exercise of cutting lettuce. Also, I like to get creative with ingredients -- I use whatever is handy and/or needs to be used. The secrets to this salad are two: (1) the salt and lemon, which you ideally leave on for several minutes. This draws the juices out of the produce, and (2) a ridiculous amount of stirring, the longer the better. This is part of Salad Zen. Mitch's Salad - A Masterpiece Cookbooks show that this is an adaptation of the typical Lebanese salad, perfected by my father over the course of 60 years. We all make our versions of it, and they all taste different. It really depends on the particular ingredients -- which is how it should be, right? Let agribusiness work on consistency. This is simple food.
I can't even describe how lovely this salad is as a leftover. I put it on sandwiches and on crackers, too. I have met some truly talented communicators in my life span as a freelance writer. I have been on an assignment to write a story about things as technical and complex as a bridge design or a heart operation and come across a person who was so passionate about his or her field that I was pulled in. Not only was it thrilling, it made understanding the subject much easier. In the best cases, my newfound knowledge and enthusiasm made its way into the written word. I'd call it the merger of art and science. I am a regular listener of a program called "On Being with Krista Tippett," a Peabody Award-winning public radio show with fascinating and diverse guests. One by one they provide their perspective on what it means to be human, and alive in our day and age. Most of the guests are all of these things: full of ideas, good communicators, charismatic and stimulating. But one in particular serves as an example of how to explain complex concepts in a way that people can understand. The guest's name is Marlene Wertheim, and she is among other things, a physicist, author, and co-creator of a provocative work of art called the "Crochet Coral Reef." From the beginning of the interview it was clear that Wertheim refuses to accept assumptions – she challenges everything when it comes to left/right brain, or the distinctions between art and science. When it became clear that there were no books on physics that people could understand, she wrote one, Pythagoras' Trousers. Her life's work has become putting the thrill of scientific questions into context, across human history and culture. In other words, humanizing science. Playing with Ideas In 2005, Marlene and her twin sister Christine (who is an artist) collaborated on a perfect specimen of this concept with what the website calls "a wooly celebration of the intersection of higher geometry and feminine handicraft, and a testimony to the disappearing wonders of the marine world." The Wertheim sisters, who grew up in Australia near the Great Coral Reef, started from the Crochet Coral Reef exhibitconcept that reef organisms are biological manifestations of a mathematical concept called "hyperbolic geometry." These models can only be duplicated, it was discovered by a Latvian mathematician scientist who grew up knitting and crocheting, through a specific kind of crochet work. Bit by bit these women and the hundreds who joined them have created artificial reefs of nature-inspired yarn. The idea is to call attention to the disappearance of these magnificent structures due to ocean warming. It's a fantastic story, still in the making. But what strikes me is the communication aspect: these wonderfully category-defiant people found a way to make understandable an extremely complex concept that would otherwise be only known to scientists. And they did it with some bits of yarn and a traditionally domestic art. It's what Marlene Wertheim calls "embodying ideas so you can play with them." And then there's the next level, which I'll just let Ms. Wertheim explain: "the Crochet Coral Reef project is a metaphor . . . Each coral polyp is a tiny insignificant little critter with almost no power of its own. But when billions of coral polyps come together, they can build the Great Barrier Reef, the largest living thing on earth and first living thing that you can see from outer space." So many worlds collide, so many threads come together. Communication-wise, this is a world-class "aha!" moment. All of our efforts cannot be this majestic, but we can strive to be clear and innovative thinkers, and in that way make our message heard. Find out more about the Crochet Coral Reef here. Listen to the podcast of the Marlene Wertheim episode of "On Being with Krista Tippett" here. I thought this poem by Elan Mudrow was appropriate. I love Elan's combination of vintage photographs and frequently whimsical verse. I never thought I'd see a poem about a dish towel!
For the past 3 and 1/2 years, Beyond Her has been in a warehouse space in North Houston. The amount of room (1400 SF) has been lovely, but we woke up Jan 1 2015 with a new idea in mind.
Meet our new workspace in La Grange, Texas, a sweet little town about mid-way between Houston and Austin. The production shop will be located in a small outbuilding that once served as a bakery (?!) -- a much smaller, but much more scenic place. We have work to do, including downsizing in a big way. I'm so excited to have this opportunity to clear my head and focus on the work ahead. I have ideas -- oh boy, do I have ideas! -- for what's next. Tune in regularly to see how spring takes hold in this picturesque setting, and how we're putting the cottage back into cottage industry. I'm no photographer, but almost every day that I venture into the woods, I feel obligated to try to capture the unbelievable beauty surrounding me. You'll find many of these same images in my art -- these are friends of mine - amazing friends that continue to support and sustain me after I get home. I am thankful that, somewhere along the line, I learned to look up and look close. This is where the heart is. |
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