RHUBARB AND LOGANBERRY

Moments of bliss this week.

CULTURAL
Spelunking

I’ve been following two photo blogs a lot lately, “The Blue Hour” by Brian and “This is Naïve: Miscellany of a Girl’s Life” by Tommy. Both of them live in London and take melancholic pictures of evocative objects and scenes. They take a lot of pictures of food, British food.

So I was really happy to eat at Smith today and try their “Full English Breakfast” while J. and her old Canadian friends had their fill of the best poutine in Seattle and round after round of perfect coffee in narrow brown mugs. A Full English Breakfast involves 3 eggs fried, ham, baked tomato, house-made sausage, baked beans & fry bread. It is big enough for two and the beans are the best. A perfect understated breakfast in a dark cavernous room surrounded by taxidermy and odd portraits of American presidents.

I like it so much when objects are presented in a simple but particular and thoughtful way, when designs evoke cultural history, when the mystery of composition carries the viewer, or in this case the eater, through to a new appreciation of texture, atmosphere, and the actual colors of abstract ideas. That sort of thing.

NORTH SHORE

Outside the Cocoon

We go to the North Shore because it’s wild and cold and the atmosphere is electric and wet. It’s an absolutely unforgiving place where things, giant trees, abandoned tin cans, are pounded smooth. We saw stone-crusted gray whales and ratty bald eagles and thought that sunny days and purple flowers are nice but not the same as Edmund Burke’s sublime which is found in “terror, obscurity, power, vastness, infinity, difficulty, magnificence and darkness.”

We are always looking for things that “unlock the valves of feeling and therefore return the onlooker to life.” Walking in the blinding rain with your chin tilted to the wind using the Pete Seeger method you feel something like this.

Out here in the pre-verbal world things seem slow and uncomplicated, just brute elements really, but then when we laugh and swoop along, back to our future and past, things get very fast and there is music in the air pushing us on.