Another Windy Channel

It's become part of our routine at Bean Hollow Beach -- making a sculpture from organic beach gleanings. Here's what the kids made yesterday and decided should be called 'The Windy Channel II.'

And a couple of close-ups:

We found a large log to be the centerpiece this time.

The water was very calm and had been for while, judging by how slim the stick and seaweed pickings were. There were lots of small limpets, though.

(Im)perfect pot

After a while, Ada had had all the classical Greek culture she could take (Michael, being in the thick of a months-long Greek goddess kick, was up for much more). So she and I took refuge in Asian antiquities, many of the best of which, like those of ancient Greece, have ended up in Bloomsbury.
 
We headed for Korea, inspired by Sangil, Ada's friend from first grade who's now, to her distress, returned home.
 
Up at the top of the British Museum and quite hard to find, the Korean galleries are quiet and light-filled. Ceramics predominate and they are exquisite. I'd not appreciated the Korean love of simplicity over ornament before. It's very modern and very zen (well, Confucian, really) and wonderfully restrained.
 
This, for me, was the highlight: a simple large and rather irregular white pot with enormous character. Much more engaging than a perfect form. It had the added interest of being bought in Korea in 1935 by Bernard Leach, who admired and collected Korean ceramics before almost anyone else in the UK. He asked his fellow British potter Lucie Rie to look after it during the Second World War and felt that it sat so well in her studio that she should keep it. On her death, Rie left it to Janet Leach. The British Museum acquired it in 1999 from the Janet Leach estate.

The pot is a 17th or 18th century 'Moon' jar of the Choson dynasty (1392-1910). The accidents in its making are part of what we are supposed to appreciate, the BM website tells us. I wonder if that extends to accidents in finding it. I'm sure it does.

Dark clouds

You might not think these were taken mid-afternoon in a month when dusk falls around ten PM.  But then this is England in July.  

In London, Primrose Hill has been mightily atmospheric.

As has St Pauls from the Thames.

Stonehenge was positively bright by comparison.

In fathoming the scarp (verse)

In fathoming the scarp and cwm
Long ocean berm,
Tight cove,
Cold spring
And cracked
Summer creek bed

The geographer
Reaps
Explanations

Slow and contingent,

Whole lives lived, sometimes,
Before they grandly set,
As stone, perhaps, or sand.

As a child I swam with purpose in my own
Landscape
Sublime.

It fed my dreams. 

In Hampshire’s copper beechwood understory,
Descending fern-swathed island chines,
Racing the tide at Polzeath,

In tall August grass
Amid the skyscape
Of ancient Eggardon,
A king’s seat if there ever was,
Whole counties at my feet,
I marveled. 

And then I went to school. 

And ever since
Escarpments have betrayed their long upheavals,
Cols the diamond gouge of hard-packed ice,
Every beach the sifted upcast of its
Endless waves.

Even woods, I now see first as systems,
Vulnerable to change. 

As the father is revealed,
Inevitably,
As fallible to the
Growing child,

So Time
In its distain for
All fragility
Grants
Us our irrevocable progress,

A fabric too dense
Almost
To lift,

Except in memory.  A marvel there, at least.

Heaven

it is to be at Lake Lagunita (Stanford, CA) and find toads and frogs in June.   We hadn't been back since April, when there were barely tadpoles to find.  And now, in early June the lake is dry.  But, miraculously, the young amphibians seem to have timed it perfectly.  They're now adult (but still small) toads and frogs, ready to risk both a snake's hunger and a child's affection in hopping from the center of the lake to the periphery, where they will live out the rest of the summer hoping, as we all will, for a much damper fall than has been the fashion of late.

The same time last year, this was still a pond.

A grassland now, it is still home to a good few thousand young California toads (Bufo boreas halophilus).

 

And Pacific Tree (or Chorus) Frogs (Pseudacris regilla) -- which are harder to catch but more interesting, in that they vary hugely in their markings.  This is the greenest end of the spectrum.  But they go to a grey that is all but the same as the toads, and also a bronze that is unreal in its chemical intensity.  

We also saw a Western Yellow-bellied Racer (snake), but it slipped away before I could snap a picture.

Girls go to Mars / to get more bras / Boys go to Jupiter / to get more stupider

Ada's suddenly into playground rhyming/clapping games. Being an adult of my time, that didn't immediately spur me to share with her the few routines I remembered from my youth. No, I went straight online to see if there was a comprehensive video reference guide to playground clapping games. And of course there is at least one. Being a child of her time, Ada had the same thought. "Let's look for other rhymes on your computer!"
 
Luckily, I distracted her and checked the site out first. The best one that I found is wonderful, but also, as Ada would put it, inappropriate. At least for a seven year old. While we might be able to deal with:
 
Girls are sexy made out of Pepsi
Boys are rotten, made out of cotton
Girls go to Mars to get more bras
Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider
 
I'm not so sure about:
 
Mary had a little lamb
She also had a duck
she took him round the corner
and taught him how to . . .
fry an egg for breakfast
fry your eggs for tea
the more you eat
the more drink
the more you want to . . .
Peter had a boat
the boat began to rock
out jumped Jaws
and bit him on the . . .
cocktail, ginger ale, forty cents a glass
 
and so on.
 
As it happens, I grew up near where the Opies, those great child folklorists, lived and many of the songs and chants they collected survived in the playgrounds in which I played. But I don't remember them publishing material that pushed adult buttons to that degree.
 
If anyone knows of a video reference that's a little more . . . appropriate, please let me know.

Random Maker Faire Pics - from Steam Punk to Fluff Punk

This wasn't the adventure in photography that it might have been, thanks to my having to lug a large piece of Blinglish technology around with me for most of the time (see item immediately below).

 But here are a few, fairly random pictures from the Faire.

The Shark Car.

One of the mobile cupcakes.

The giant light fixture.

Just a part of the human-scale Mousetrap game.

The Jules Verne-inspired Steam Punk house.
 
There was lots of Steam Punk at the Faire and I have to say I was quite taken with the Steam Punk fashions on display (Avengers meets burlesque meets 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea). I also liked its antitheses, what you might call Fluff Punk, as represented by this fake fur covered-caterpillar truck.