The morning of the hoist: The exterior has just been complete, the clapboarding nailed, the chimney set.

The worksite around the Fallen Star. Yes, those are trees with autumn-colored leaves.

The house and the big hydraulic crane that will launch it.

One of the film crews settles into place

The worksite with the extended crane

The audience

The house 80+ feet in the air, being lowered onto its finale perch

And we have contact…

A closer view of the landed house

And here’s a Youtube video of the big hoist from the Jacobs School of Engineering, the school that is housed in the structure that the house landed on:

And another from a different viewpoint, more dramatic than the first. The first two minutes are the best:

And for you total junkies, yet another vantage point. Once again the first part is the most dramatic.

The piece a couple mornings later, after the removal of the cranes…

There’s still more work to do before the grand unveiling, a TV and fireplace to install inside, a garden to plant outside. But this was definitely a big milestone. I’ll post more once I get up on the roof and have some closeup views.

In this photo Lt. John Pike of the police force of the University of California, Davis demonstrates the proper way to apply pesticides and fungicides in your garden. The lieutenant’s top tips:

• Wear gloves! The stuff is gross. Keep it off your hands.
• Wear long pants and long-sleeved shirts. You don’t want the nasty stuff on you!
• Pick a day with little or no wind. You want to control exactly where the poison goes.
• Apply from the distance recommended by the manufacturer. The product label should tell you. Too close, you waste material. Too far, you risk ineffective coverage and your treatment won’t have the desired effect.
• Wear eye protection. I know, I know. I don’t have the visor down in the photo. Silly me. Don’t do as I do, just do as I say!

The riot-gear helmet is entirely optional, but a respirator–or at least a mask–is a really good idea. Happy spraying!

For other parodies of last Friday’s UC Davis pepper spray incident check out:
[ tumblr ]
[ Huffington Post ]
[ The New York Times ]

And why stop there? Invite Lt. Pike over to tomorrow’s Thanksgiving pictures! Entice him into your vacation pictures with your ex! And what better way to improve those musty family pictures with the siblings you’re not sure you’re really related to?

The house being built on the ground, with its eventual perch being readied high on the roof of the building behind it.

Here a few random construction photos that show the development of part of Do Ho Suh’s Fallen Star installation that I posted on a few weeks ago [ here ]. I’m sure there are practical reasons for building the little house on the ground before hoisting it seven stories into the air to its perch on the side. But having it take shape at eye level has been interesting and exciting, and it’s a great way to involve future viewers of the artwork in the piece as it evolves from yards of concrete and stacks of steel beams.

As I view the piece come into being I can’t help but imagine being the construction firm approached to construct this little one-room building: “We want you to build us a house. Only much of it’s going to cantilevered over the edge of a tall building. And the house itself has to be built with a strong rake to the foundation, making the whole house slant at a serious angle…” A project like this doesn’t come along every day, and I’m sure somebody had some serious fun getting to work on it.

The steel fram takes shape. Here you can see there’s lots more engineering in this project than most houses that nest on the ground.

Framing for windows being installed…

Sheathing going on…

The sheathed house, crooked on the horizon, at sunrise…

After the building wrap…

Foggy morning with the wrapped house, still crooked on the horizon…

Sheathing going up on the roof…

Shingles now in place…

At this point the project has progressed to where stuff is happening on the inside, but it’s a mystery to outside viewers. The next big milestone will be when the exterior sheathing with its bouncy blue color shows up. Stay tuned.

Aerial rendering of the project location showing the rooftop with the crooked house and garden.

I touched base with the Stuart Collection folks about the “garden” around the house. Yes, it’s going to be live plants. The intent is to make the garden look a bit like the house, as if house and garden are little slice of Provincetown that have flown and and been wedged into the California fabric.

There are probably thousands of Southern California houses with clapboard siding and gardens with hydrangeas and roses that would be good models for what the artist is trying to achieve. As much as these gardens require lots of added water and attention to get them to thrive, the real stunt will be to try to pull off the effect when the house and garden will be elevated seven stories into the air. The collection is working with a landscape architect to come up with a mix of plants that will represent the botanical displacement but also be plants that will survive life on the edge, exposed to the elements.

It shouldn’t be that much longer before this house gets lifted into place. I suspect they’ll be using cranes and not a giant flock of balloons, even though several of you have commented on how much the plans for the house make it out to be a dead-ringer for the flying house in Up. More pictures to follow…

Here’s the artist’s rendering for a new project that’s going up on the way to my weekday office. In this view things look pretty normal: a clapboard house, lawn, shrubberies, foundation plantings, patio furniture, shade umbrella–nostalgic Americana, tidy, idyllic.

But here’s an alternate view of the entire project. In this piece, “Fallen Star,” by artist Do Ho Suh, this little blue house hangs over the edge of one of the campus buildings, seven stories above the quad below.

The project description on the Stuart Collection’s page for the project provides some background, including this:

For the Stuart Collection, Suh has proposed Fallen Star, a small house that has been picked up by some mysterious force, (perhaps a tornado) and “landed” on a building, seven stories up. A roof garden is part of Suh’s design and will be a place with panoramic views for small groups to gather. This can be seen as a “home” for the vast numbers of students who have left their homes to come to this huge institution, the university, which has nothing even resembling a home. It is an unforgettable image and will be a truly amazing experience sure to stay in the minds and memory of students and visitors for years to come.”

Do Ho Suh Fallen Star rendering and view of the piece’s eventual perch.

Some projects you can look at and tell immediately that they’re going to be popular. This is one of them.

Count me in to stand in line to get a chance to visit the installation after it’s completed and open, currently projected to be January 2012. It should be a cool mix of fun and unnerving, looking for home on the edge in a fading empire.

Keeping that in mind, when I was recently trying to decide where I might want to go on a short little summer vacation, San Diego won out. Really, when Newark recently hit 108, D.C., D.C. struck 105 and Dallas roasted at 100 or more for three weeks solid, it was hard to think about going anywhere else, especially now in the hot breath of summer.

Monarch butterfly on ginger

So home it was. Long weekends in the garden…monarrch butterflies…

The long weekends were an excuse to get to the beach and get my feet wet. Pathetic that I haven’t done this in over two years.

The extra days were also an excuse to go for a short visit to Torrey Pines State Preserve, where lots was still in bloom even though it’s high summer and there’s been no significant rain for several months:

The new cat, hiding in the cables behind the electronics…

And we adopted a new cat. She’s closer to feral than being a lap cat, but we’re hoping that she’ll at least not feel the need to hide behind the furniture while humans are around.

James SOE NYUN. Yellowstone Lake Hotel, Yellowstone National Park, 2008. Digital pigment print, 16x19.75 inches.

And last, I had the chance to participate in some art stuff. I’m in the current 20th Juried Exhibition at the La Jolla Athenaeum. I was really surprised and honored that I was awarded first prize by the local big art name jurrors, Kathryn Kanjo of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and Joseph Bellows of the photo gallery that bears his name. Woohoo!

This is one of three images in the show, works from the Yellowstone region that channel photographers from the nineteenth century. If you’re on vacation here in town, stop by. The show is up through September 3.

Enjoy what’s left of the summer!

Guerrilla knitter Kevin Gauge (not his real name) has modified five stop signs around the Clairemont neighborhood of San Diego, adding knitted stems and a pair of leaves to the support posts.

I’m probably not divulging anything too sensitive when I repeat that Clairemont is occasionally referred to as “Squaremont,” and that this home-centric community seems to cluster around a couple of homes away from home, Home Depot and Home Town Buffet.

I’ll have to admit that I get a little touchy when someone calls my neighborhood “Clairemont”: Clairemont is over a block away, and most of it is on the other side of the canyon. It has a different telephone area code. It has a totally different postal ZIP code. No, no, no, I do not live in Clairemont!

So to battle this apparent blandness the yarnbomber has proposed doing this to a hundred stop signs. He’s set up a blog, Stop Sign Flower, with some photos of past projects and some background. And to finance the enterprise he’s using Kickstarter.com to “Turn stop signs in San Diego into flowers!”

If you explore his blog a bit you’ll read that the knitter (who also goes by “knitting guy”) was inspired by one of the pieces by street artist Kevin Mark Jenkins. Check out Jenkins’ web page [ here ] and scroll down, down, down (past the dead mannikin with the perky balloons attached to it floating in the river in Malmö) to the Washington D.C. stop sign that started it all.

I find it interesting that street art is pretty much a boy’s club, and now there’s a male knitter who appears to be combating some of the medium’s general associations with being women’s work by taking it on the road. But I’m overgeneralizing on this tendency. According to the font of often-accurate information, Wikipedia, yarn bombing was started by a woman, Houston’s Magda Sayeg, and International Yarnbombing Day, first held on June 11 of this year, was the brainchild of another woman, Joann Matvichuk.

God. Is knitting so girly that even most of its street artists are women?

Knitting Guy–more power to ya!

[ Thanks to “Kevin Gauge” for the photo above, which is used by here with his permission. ]

There’s this dead tree outside my weekday office. A crew has been working on it for the last two weeks.

It’s one of three very dead trees that make up an 1986 installation by Terry Allen. Set in an area of the UCSD campus that’s seen many of the campus’ signature eucalyptus cut down to make way for buildings, they’re in part supposed to embody trees that were lost to the chainsaw of progress. The writeup at the Stuart Collection website has lots of things to say about the project, including: “Although they ostensibly represent displacement or loss, these trees offer a kind of compensation: one emits a series of recorded songs and the other a lively sequence of poems and stories created and arranged specifically for this project.”

This tree–the dead-looking gray one towards the left of this frame–plays recorded spoken things.

Yes. Two of the artist’s trees make noise. Loud, annoying noise. So in effect this artists has taken a tree–something that to me represents the possibility of the quiet that you find in a grove–and replaces it with devices with speakers in them that pollute the thin grove with poetry and loud music. By banishing what’s left of the quiet it’s the aural equivalent of clearcutting what’s left of the trees. You call that compensation?

I do not love this work.

This one plays music. Someone had brought in a plastic chair so they could sit and listen to the giant lead-plated iPod.

The trees in the project started out their lives in the adjacent groves but were removed. They were then dissembled and soaked in wood preservative. Once thoroughly embalmed, the trees were reassembled and sheets of lead nailed all over their outer surfaces. Over the course of 25 years the one mute tree–the one with the scissor lift next to it in the first phot above–developed the sort of white and yellow oxidation that lead can acquire over time. Oxidized lead makes up the artist’s pigment lead yellow, and sulfides of lead can turn the lead white.

The trunk of the spoken-word tree

I guess the natural processes went against the artist’s intentions of having a dark ghost of a tree the color of raw lead. The two workers have been pounding and cleaning and maybe even replacing some of the lead plating. The tree is starting to look really dead again.

My final thoughts? I don’t think this artist really gets nature. Natural processes are being denied. And now, you can’t hear the forest for the trees.

When I visited Crestridge Ecological Preserve last May the rock roses (Helianthemum scoparium) were announcing themselves assertively. The little low plants were at their peak and vibrated with dozens to hundreds of brilliant yellow five-petaled flowers on each plant.

And anywhere that you saw rock roses you’d see hundreds of rock rose petals beneath the plants. I was trying to decide what I liked better, the flowering plants, or the red earth beneath them, dusted gold with fallen petals.

Rock rose. Cool plant.

“Cool plant” might not be your first reaction to the dodder (Cuscuta californica) that was everywhere. Lacking chlorophyll, its only way of surviving is to latch on to a host plant and suck on its vital plant juices, depleting the host while growing extravagantly all over it.

Hillside with chaparral mallow, chamise, pearly everlastings, deerweed and…dodder (the gold, twiny stuff)

Someone on the trip pointed out that DNA work has established this as a member of the Convolvulaceae, the same family that includes Calystegia, the genus of native morning glories, as well as Convolvulus, the genus that contains the common garden morning glories. The new draft Jepson manual follows this classification.

Dodder doing its thing, with chamies, golden yarrow and Lakeside ceanothis in the background. Ooh, pretty…

If you’ve planted the garden morning glories, only to recoil in horror at how they coil over absolutely everything in their path, you’ll recognize the growth pattern that dodder adopts. Like morning glories, it twines like crazy. And, it’s parasitic! Extra bonus!! Dodder is an annual, so that even though it feeds off its host, it does so for only part of the year, mainly during the growing season when the host stands the best hope of keeping up with the dodder’s demands.

All that ickiness aside I happen to love how the stuff looks, twiny and golden, working its way through the landscape. Visually, it does what nothing else in the landscape does. I’m not the only person struck by its forms. There’s a fairly abstract, very modernist photo of dodder in Laguna Beach that was taken by Edward Weston way back in 1937. [ Check out the image at the Center for Creative Photography, in Tucson. ]

So, as far as I’m concerned: Dodder. Cool plant.

About the time I took this trip I happened to open up the Sunday comics to see the week’s Bizarro single-panel. I won’t stomp all over copyright and lift the image for here, but you can view it on Dan Piraro’s blog [ here ]. But let me try to describe it:

Night. Suburbia. Exterior of a house with a lawn and low, mounding foundation plantings. A sidewalk leads away from the front door. Tight shot of a couple who are leaving the house.

The woman, smiling, says to the man, “What terrific hosts.”

Behind them, in the doorway of their home, stands the host couple. Light spills out from indoors and onto the stoop. The man wears a pair of round black glasses, “Harry Potter glasses” you might say, though you sense that he was wearing them long before Harry Potter existed. He waves a weak farewell.

Next to him the hosting woman stands, her hands clasped. She does not look happy. She speaks.

“What incredible parasites.”

Who’d ever think that the host/parasite relationship would ever be material for the funny pages? Talk about timing, talk about coincidence, the trip to Crestridge, the dodder, the Sunday comic…

As you try to play host, the party can pass by so fast you don’t have time to really take it in. And before you know everyone has left and you’re left with what people didn’t eat or drink, plus all the things people bring along, edible and not.

Inventorying the drinks it almost looks like we have more cans and bottles than we started with. I guess people were scared to try this year’s weird/unusual beverage offering, Malta India, a sweet non-alcoholic drink from Puerto Rico. We ended up with eight out of eight bottles unconsumed. And there were gifts of a lot of sixpacks of things we didn’t start out with.

There was a gift of this patriotic chrysanthemum…

…and then this…

I’ve known San Diego artist Tom Driscoll for a while, and he brought along one of his recent pieces.

Tom Driscoll: Array 2, in a preliminary mockup before its exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Gypsum cement and powdered pigment.

For several years now he’s been making casts in found molds–the packaging for various consumer products that we usually throw away–using gypsum cement and powdered pigment. Talk about recylcing.

Here’s a preparatory installation in his studio of a big piece, Array 2, that was featured in the Here Not There: San Diego Art Now exhibition last year at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.

Tom Driscoll. Array 2, detail of installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Photo: Elena Jacinto.

Here’s an alternate view, looking upwards, that lets you appreciate the physicality of the components.

If the only thing keeping you from bringing this piece home is that it might not match your sofa, you could reupholster your living room suite in this fabric, Alexander Girard’s 1954 Quatrefoil design, shown here in the “pink” colorway… (Image from eamesfabric.com.)

The piece that Tom brought to the party is a cast of packaging for a computer mouse. Although you look at the object and say “computer mouse,” the packaging was a simplified version of the original object. The resulting piece is more like a sketch of the original object, not a faithful reproduction. It looks great, but if you’re lucky you can complete the experience of the piece by holding it in your hand: cool, smooth, muscular and heavy, it looks and feels like an artwork crafted out of an exuberantly colored piece of stone. If Jean Arp or Constantin Brâncusi sculpted computer mice they might look and feel something like this. This is one seriously sensual object! And–yikes!–I actually have a red sofa it would match.

Thanks, Tom, and thanks to everyone else who contributed to making this a great day!

Here’s the latest addition to the garden, a small chunk of the House of Hospitality in Balboa Park, a small chunk of San Diego architectural history.

In the late 1990s the city rehabilitated the building, one of many historic structures built as temporary exhibition spaces for the 1915 Panama–PacificCalifornia Exposition. The exhibit halls weren’t really intended to be a landmarks to pass into time immemorial. But the city has grown attached to these examples of Churrigueresque architecture, and the buildings are actively preserved.

(“Churrigueresque” refers to the Spanish/Catalan architect José Benito de Churriguera, who developed a fairly elaborate Rococo style of ornament that was picked up in Colonial Mexico. Bertram Goodhue and Carleton M. Winslow, the architects who worked on the Exposition, studied the style in Mexico and brought it a few miles north of the border. The over-the-top plaster details made for dramatic and escapist exposition buildings, but the details are high maintenance and can begin to fail over the years. It got to the point that the ornamentation was falling off the buildings and threatening to ka-bonk passers-by.)

“Preservation” of the building went through several phases, and eventually employed the wrecking ball. The old House of Hospitality was demolished and a new one erected in its place. To make sure that the new building closely resembled the original the old ornamentation was removed from the buildings and casts made. The new ornamentation is now made of glass-fiber-reinforced-concrete instead of the original horsehair-reinforced plaster.

Rather than landfilling the old architectural ornamentation, the interesting chunks were sold off to benefit the preservation efforts. And it was on a frantic Saturday morning in 1997 where we were able to fight off some of the most aggressive shoppers I’ve ever encountered to pick up this piece of local history. I’m pretty sure that my chunk of history comes from the tower in the photo above, from around the arches.

The fragment was really cool, but it sat in various corners of the house and my studio as we decided what to do with it. Last month we finally decided to liberate the piece back to the outdoors. Here’s its probably final resting place, attached to a long blank stretch of fence above the fishpond.

I don’t typically go in for lots of garden art or pieces of fake Roman artifacts sprinkled around a garden. But I was happy with how this relatively small chunk of Balboa Park serves as a cool focal point for a part of the garden presided over by a long, plain fence.

In demolishing the original building and dispersing its surfaces the city has managed an odd sort of preservation. Zoos and botanical gardens sometimes have the sad burden of keeping alive species that no longer exist in the wild. And my back yard holds a piece of a building that exists only in a facsimile of the original.