I was born with the Space Age, more or less. The U.S. response to Sputnik, Explorer I, launched a few months before I did.
I was an avid reader of science fiction from an early age. I witnessed the first moon walk, way past my bedtime. I have followed every twist and turn, triumph and tragedy, of our space program ever since. I still believe that—should we manage to avoid destroying ourselves first—humanity must eventually grow beyond our marvelous, amazing, glorious home on Earth.
Our exploration of space is now confined largely to fantastic achievements in remote control: little, intricate, robust robots that sometimes perform way beyond their specs. That’s great, but it lacks the romance, the daring, and the sheer wonder of putting human bodies into completely new environments.
There’s always something ‘more urgent’ to spend money on here at home, locally. But the aspiration that drives, the exploration that reveals, and the inspiration that motivates require big dreams and large canvases. Forget the practical benefits that accrue from the science behind space travel, and focus on the underlying faith and optimism that a vision of space-faring humanity implies: not only can we survive and achieve, we should, because our capacity for goodness is worthy of it.
This photograph is nothing special, but it is a photograph of something very special indeed.
The SR-71 is, in my view, the single most astonishingly beautiful work of industrial design from the twentieth century. Signifier and signified—form and function—are united in this vessel in an unprecedented way. You cannot look at this object without understanding, viscerally, what it is and what it does.
It is fast. It is secret. It is unconventional. It is blazingly modern (still! despite being put into service in 1964). It is both costly and tremendously valuable. It is about acquiring information, and not at all about destruction. Its defense was simply to be better and faster than its enemies.
How I wish I had seen this plane in flight! (Although, given that it traveled from coast to coast in little more than an hour, if you blinked you probably missed it.)
This was one of the first aircraft built using CAD (computer-aided-design),* but everything about it points to a unified vision, a designer’s personal stamp. The chines and the jet-within-a-ramjet design may have been dictated by equations, but the whole is not merely a product of its parts. It fits together the way it does because somebody decided that’s the way it needed to be.
The cant of the tailfins is so visually compelling that it showed up in spacecraft—which would have, of course, no need for such aerodynamically-dictated elements—in popular science fiction movies (Star Wars, I’m looking at you).
This object is a concrete expression of excellence. Everyone involved in its design and operation knew it. And so do the rest of us who have eyes to see.
*Hmm. Different sources say different things on this point. If it was designed with slide rules and blueprints, all the more amazing.
There was a time (coinciding with an era of much less widespread affluence and privilege) when flying was a glamorous affair. It was like going to the opera; people dressed for the occasion. Flight attendants were envied their airborne careers.
It was a time when the tail of an airliner was tattooed with a logo in fabulous deco letters that evoked the plane’s own presence. When this aluminum-clad, thoroughly riveted creature swam through the sky with unprecedented altitude, speed, and style, there was a whole lot of nasty stuff happening on the ground. A lot of wrongness. But all the joy-toys of the fly-boys were eye-catching, charming, romantic, dashing. They whispered sweet nothings about freedom, skill, play, and daring. You could make a movie about air travel that was neither cynical nor ironic.
Compare that to commercial air travel these days. It’s relatively cheap, but that’s about all you can say good about it. There’s no excitement in civilian aviation these days. The only thrills to be found now are in military flight. And those involve death. Lots and lots of death.
I bow to no one in my love of the digital. Well-done digital is, in a word, schweet.
But there is something truly special in a beautiful piece of old-school, hard-core mechanical technology. You know, back when the science of engineering was explicitly and only about the handling of actual, physical materials. To see a thing made truly fit for its purpose is to see something beautiful.
Aviation is an unforgiving science. If you screw up, it’s gonna be really ugly. It is a joy, therefore, that so many of physics equations yield tools and affordances with tremendous presence and visual style. The ways and means of flight are, more often than not, elegant—especially those that come from an era before collective committee design.
And if you are the slightest bit fond of the steampunk aesthetic, the Air & Space Museum has got your number.
Bob and I spent a few hours at the Udvar-Hazy branch of the Smithsonian’s Air & Space Museum. I enjoyed revisiting a few favorites (SR-71 Blackbird FTW!) and discovering some hitherto overlooked marvels.
For sheer visual lusciousness, however, the iridescent blue-green tile of the square-arched entrance way has a lot to recommend it. Steve Jobs would describe these colors as “lickable.” If you look at the larger version of this image, you can see that these surfaces seem to attract other people’s interest too; there are fingerprints visible in the light layer of dust on the wall.
This shawl is completely of my own design. It uses patterns from a variety of sources, and I basically made it up as I went along. It’s the first lace I’ve done using lightweight yarn, which took getting used to.
I used Mountain Colors hand-painted 50% wool/50% silk Winter Lace in Ruby River, and a size 6 needle. This shawl used about 3/4 of ONE 100 gram skein (approx. 1200 yds). It is remarkably lightweight, and super-soft and floaty. The colors blend together in a delightful way, conveying the turning-leaf motif I had in mind.
If you can’t tell: I’m very pleased with the way this came out, especially since it was essentially improvised. Sure, there are some boo-boos and a few less-than-elegant transitions, but overall I like it a lot. And despite being full of holes and on some level barely there, it actually does a surprisingly effective job of providing a gossamer layer of insulating warmth on a cool evening or in excessive air-conditioning.
I hereby pronounce myself effectively undaunted by lace. Bring it, tricky lace patterns!
Despite having chiding myself for doing precisely this just a few days ago, I once again managed to leave the house without my camera.
Lucky for me, Bob had his camera tucked away in the Fannypack of Great Awesomeness, and I was able to capture this pattern of mesh, color, light & shadow.
This circumstance is a fine example of the virtuous cycle. It has given me great pleasure that Bob has started taking an increased interest in observing and cataloging the things of beauty or curiosity in his day-to-day life. I take some small credit for encouraging that. And because he has begun to value this practice, he had his camera on him when I did not.
He doesn’t especially care for this picture, whereas I really like it. (It puts me in mind of some Lazlo Moholy-Nagy images.) That’s fine. Diversity of taste and creative vision is a good thing, it gives all of us something to share with one another.
Just as a side note: although it probably doesn’t much show at these web-ready resolutions, there is indeed a meaningful quality distinction between my everyday camera (the Panasonic Lumix GF-1) and Bob’s Nikon Coolpix S630, a compact point-and-shoot. I have become accustomed to the lovely clarity of big, fast optics and the forgiving dynamic range made possible by shooting RAW. The difference was instantly clear as I was trying to wrangle the best out of the high-res JPEGs that Bob’s camera produces. The pixel count of the two cameras is identical, which underscores the oft-repeated truism that size isn’t everything — when it comes to megapixels, anyway.
Submitted my photo After The Flood (http://bit.ly/bvpjhm) to PhotoweekDC contest. It may not win, but I bet there won't be anything like it.4:22 AM - Sep 8
Round 2 of Project Fabric Test has been initiated. Should receive a new batch of swatches in 7-10 days. V. curious to see results!3:06 AM - Sep 7
Hours of cutting squares out of fabric and still not done with it. Gotta quit now because my neck is überstiff. Quilting=labor intensive.2:09 AM - Sep 7
Relaundering a subset of fabrics to use in quick quilt project. So many possibilities! http://plixi.com/p/432828978:29 PM - Sep 4
RT @bigbrightbulb: Rule #7: do not read email just before bed. Rule #8: do not respond to blog comments at 3:45 in the morning... Uh oh. :-)9:42 AM - Sep 4
