During the week, I look often from my office to the flickering work lights of a half-finished building south of Lake Union, where Seattle’s skyline is acquiring a new shape and solidity. The lights are distributed regularly throughout the building’s boxy frame, and they radiate in morning fog, pulsate in the fair skies of midday, and shine like beacons… Read more »
“Beauty is vapour from the pit of death.” (The Peregrine, p. 180) For the last several months, I’ve been coming to the Henry Art Gallery most Wednesdays to read from a book about a hawk season in the fenlands of eastern England. To describe J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine as only that, though, would be to diminish it. Baker’s… Read more »
Fall, in Seattle, is a time of spiders. Giant house spider males, close relatives to the Tegenaria duellica David Sedaris writes about feeling such easy if fraught kinship with in his essay April & Paris: Caught in the Web of Nature, search for females in our basement, darting away at our step. Outside, the garden… Read more »
Red Lodge, Montana, my father’s hometown, was a booming, raucous place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Following the discovery of coal in upper Rock Creek Valley in 1866, Finnish, Scottish, Welsh, and Italian immigrants – my great-grandfather and his family included – converged there, sustained by the mines that brought workers out… Read more »
When we talk about someone being unable to see the forest for the trees, the characterization is disparaging. We represent this hapless person as overcome by a mass of detail and lacking the means to perceive the organizing pattern that binds constituent parts. But I like to get a little lost now and again in… Read more »
On this day of love, relationship advice from UCLA architectural historian and theorist Sylvia Lavin to architecture and contemporary art: “‘To be one with’ may make a nice romantic fantasy, but ‘to be two with’ makes more profound politics. And possibly more gratifying as well. When kissing and enmeshed, architecture is surprised into responding, made… Read more »
Today, February 10th, is National Umbrella Day. I mark the occasion and celebrate the accessory, as my blog title is its namesake. As I began to map out my art and architecture adventures and essays in August, I hunted about for a moniker. My partner suggested Yellow Umbrella, and I appreciatively snatched the name up. I… Read more »
This past week marked the inauguration of the Seattle Design Festival. I attended a trio of talks, one part of the Festival, and two others at Town Hall that considered related topics. Some of the ideas mentioned were like old friends returning for a visit: Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis that posits that people… Read more »