GRIZZLY PEAR

written snapshots

Category: Notes

  • OPM.29 (notes on) The New West, Robert Adams, 1974

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    (notes on) The New West

    The Houston Public Library introduced me to three great books, The New West, Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places, and a third monograph that focused on reflections in the plate glass on New York City streets (but I haven’t been able to rediscover). All three books were from the 1970s and 1980s.

    The New West has kept its freshness ten years after I first discovered it, almost fifty years after publication. Even though the Rocky Mountains are a foreign place for me (the most interaction I’ve had with Denver is stretching my legs at its train station while riding the California Zephyr), the suburban scape is quite familiar.

    The tract homes are much like the simple homes I renovated in the Bay Area. I spent four years remodeling an old tract home in downtown Vegas. I now live next to freshly cleared new subdivisions in the desert. The book’s business strips mirror my grandparent’s avenues in the San Gabriel Valley. I can also see a central business (casino) district from our house, through the dusty haze of flatland. That same highway rolled through the foothills of Austin when I started dating my wife. It also runs through the desert towards Los Angeles.

    It is all so familiar, and yet half a century foreign. Different from what I know, but every element rhymes.

    The only misstep in this book is the introduction to the chapter “Tract and Mobile Homes”.

    Few of the new houses will stand in fifty years; linoleum buckles on countertops, and unseasoned lumber twists walls out of plumb before the first occupants arrive.

    I pulled up a copy of Google maps to verify this sour prediction. There have been some changes. Big trees stand tall where the land was scraped bare and fences now divide the properties. But the homes all remain, sometimes barely touched.

    I wonder if any of the current residents know that their abode is been featured in a photographic monograph? What would they think if they stumble across a print in a fancy gallery? Do they realize the artist fully expected them their homes would quickly disappear?

    However, our ability to predict the future is often half right. I followed up the house search by looking up his busy commercial strips. Almost all of them have changed. Sometimes there are wafts of the past with similar uses in new buildings, but American commerce is one of creative destruction.

    Those examples in this book were not spared. Only the church has remained.

    And so I see our future in Las Vegas. The streets will remain. These squat stucco boxes will survive. I doubt our trees will grow as tall, but I’m curious what our shopping centers will become in the second half of this new century.

    ~

    A Question

    What do you see in your crystal ball? What will stick around in fifty years?

    Hit reply and let’s chat!

    ~

    A Link

    The Growth Equation posted about the importance of physical constraints, especially for knowledge workers who deal in data all day. This is why I love this industry. Outside of academia, architects have to deal with physical reality, even if we aren’t forced to get our hands dirty.

    … and a photo.

    Nisei Grill, San Francisco, 1942, Dorothea Lange

    ~

    Thanks for reading the OPM letter! I’d love to have a conversation if you have any feedback. I hope you found some prompts to stretch your craft as a curious Owner PM. See you soon!

    Justus Pang, RA

  • Old boxes of books

    Once or twice a year, I dig through my fifteen boxes of books in the garage. Aside from the occasional late night web purchase, these are my most materialistic exercises.

    It’s ridiculous that I keep these books.

    The enlightened unattached person should discard all these material goods. Nine years in a box is proof that they are unnecessary.

    However, I love revisiting all these little gifts (burdens?) from my younger self. Books always carry a physical memory of the moment when they were acquired or when they were read.

    Books also carry hope for future knowledge. Mainly a vain hope; I’ve lugged some of these across the continent over two decades, from Berkeley to Houston to Vegas.

    One day, when we find our own house, I envision a big bookshelf with all these books in glorious display. Maybe that’s a vain hope too.

    But for now, I occasionally rescue a select few from the garage. At least those lucky volumes are a step closer to being read.

    Now where can I find time to read?

  • Hinduism, Mark W. Muesse, Great Courses, 2003

    Hinduism was the last of the great religions that I knew nothing about.

    I was raised Christian, which rhymes with the Abrahamic religions, aided by listening to a couple of books about Judaism and Islam. I’ve also dabbled with eastern philosophy over the past decade. My forays with Tai Chi have led to reading Daoist, Buddhist, and Confucian texts. I’ve enjoyed those readings, though I reject all of their elaborate heavenly cosmologies.

    Twelve hours is a long period of time and a vanishingly short time limit to survey a great religion. Not knowing any better, I would this course did its job. It provided a rough overview of the religion, addressed some of its excesses, and provided some avenues for further exploration. It covered a wide variety of topics and dispelled the foreign exoticness of Hinduism. This course shows that all of us are trying to take care of ourselves and our own while feeling some sense of fulfillment.

    It is not easy for an atheist raised as a monotheist to relate to a polytheistic worldview. However, this course makes such a mindset more understandable. I don’t agree with the tenets that have created a rigid caste system, but I have a better sense of the overall system as a coherent whole.

    As a materialist, I reject the intricate cosmologies from all of the world’s great religions. However, raw materialism is thin gruel as a life philosophy – the 20th century created some terrible cults after rejecting the old ones. At least the great religions have stood the test of time, so a seeker might be well served by following one of those schools of thought.

    I’m not endorsing it, but if Indian polytheism floats your boat, this course seems like a reasonable start for such a journey.

    After writing the initial draft, I read a few translations of the Bhagavad Gita, which is an epic poem – in both the classic and modern sense of the term. Highly recommended.

    Everyone should read the Gita.

    But for the year after that, I never got around to reading the Vedas and Upanishads. One day, I’d love to dig into these texts as well, but I have too many other books in my backlog.

  • My Bread, January 2022

    As the year of the Ox transitions into the year of the Tiger, my bread has settled into another steady state. So here’s worth another update.

    As for the past couple of years, I’m happily using the cast iron loaf pan, which gives a nice crust all around. Towards the end of 2021, I tried cooking two loaves at a time, but our stainless steel loaf pan doesn’t pop out the bread nearly so easily.

    My recent return to the basics has continued to bear fruit with consistent success, even though the process takes a little more time.

    I start by refreshing the starter. Mix 20g starter, 20g flour, 20g water and let it sit all day until happy and bubbly. Repeat again if the original starter is looking grouchy.

    On to the main dough!

    60g starter (previously mixed)
    240g water
    300g flour (currently organic brand from Costco)
    6g salt

    (a ratio of 20:80:100:2)

    As always, I mix the first three ingredients to autolyze for half an hour and add the salt before the first fold.

    Lately, I’ve started adding 40g of raisins (non-soaked). It adds a sweet tartness and makes for an out-of-this-world butter toast.

    My baking tends to settle into a steady-state before something comes out of the blue to mess it all up (again). But at some point, things must finally settle down, right? Maybe this is the apotheosis of my sourdough baking?

    I guess I just have to wait (and bake) to find out.

    Three nights ago, I had a dream where I conducted a performance art piece airbrushing a continuous line throughout two rooms in a coffee shop. It was a strangely emotional dream as a crumpled to the floor at the end of the performance.

    Two nights ago, I dreamed about ordering an espresso at a coffee shop. I was worried about how the caffeine might affect me (I haven’t had any since the pandemic started), and I contemplated whether I should wait till March because I could then claim that I had gone a full two years of eating only homemade (or frozen) means prepared by family members.

    Last night, I dreamt about taxing a B-1 bomber around time trying to find the tarmac so we could take off.

    I wonder if logging the dreams on this blog post is making me more likely to remember them. Is the vividness of the dreams related to a practice of recording them?

    The brain is weird. Worry not, these footnotes have nothing to do with bread.

  • Aaron Copland 80th Birthday Concert, 1980

    The algorithm me fed this 80th birthday celebration for Aaron Copeland at the Kennedy Center in 1980.

    For 80, the dude is spry, I can’t imagine being on stage at that age. I don’t care if the adulation of the crowd is addictive. I don’t think I’ll have the energy to get out there and put up a show.

    It’s also wild to remember that this event happened more than forty years ago. At the time, our elites were not shy about patting themselves on their backs in highbrow fashion. This was more than a birthday concert, it was a celebration of the century of American ascendance.

    The program was properly populated his classics: the Fanfare for the Common Man, an excerpt from a concerto that sampled jazz, Appalachian Spring, and Lincoln’s Portrait. I’ve listened to them all in the past (as background music) and it was good to just sit and focus on the music for once.

    However, I must admit that I watched this concert over the course of the month, one piece at a time. I can easily consume a feature-length action flick in one sitting, but I couldn’t properly ingest serious fare in one sitting.

    One might blame the instant gratification of this internet age for such weakness, but I don’t think I would have ever thought to watch this concert when I was younger, pre-internet. I never disliked classical music; I just never had the patience for it. So I guess it’s a sign I can now watch a long program (piecemeal).

    But let’s not get carried away – I don’t think I would ever pay real cash to sit through a concert, whether classical or contemporary. Music is good for background noise, but I don’t value it enough for attention or money – especially now that everything is on Spotify for free.

    We live in wondrous times.

    Unfortunately, everything somehow ties into culture war politics nowadays. One of the surprising highlights of the program came at the start of the concert when the cameras highlighted Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter in attendance. The date of the concert was November 12, 1980, one week after he had lost his reelection campaign. What a contrast from the most recent election. Maybe some great music will do us all some good.

  • Plates + Dishes, Stephan Schacher, 2005

    Every few months, I rummage through my boxes of books looking for a specific volume. I usually come out with several books to reread, which is what happened last year (even though I didn’t find the book I was searching for).

    This photo book takes a journey through North America, photographing the food and waitresses (all women) along his extended road trip, taken over three separate legs.

    The early 2000s was a tenuous time, having just dealt with the upheaval of 9/11 and the Iraq war. But our lives had not been infected by the smartphone and its ubiquitous internet in the pocket.

    As such, Stephan foretold the incoming future. He just barely beat the trend of uploading sexy photographs of one’s meal and sharing it with the digital world.

    Not that he was searching for sexy. It’s a damn shame to travel 13,000 miles in a big loop around this large continent and just eat diner food. But that’s what he signed up to do.

    Sixteen years after publication, reading the book felt like entering a time capsule. Twice. Both for my initial page turn and slowly reviewing each photograph over the period of a week, reliving communal scenes from my early adulthood.

    As a fan of shoddy diners, the settings are intimately familiar. However, it is strange to think that I am now older than many of the ladies whose portraits are frozen in time. I wonder what they are doing these days. I wonder if they ever ponder what happened to that strange photographer who took a portrait of the meal and of them, almost two decades ago.

    After a while, it felt a bit voyeuristic (especially since the German edition is titled “Cuties and Calories”). Even so, I’ll posit this is a good book. It was definitely a great deal as a deeply discounted remainder item at Half Price Books, even worth moving across the continent for its own road trip from Houston to Las Vegas.

    The book is an interesting concept, a well-executed portrait of our nation. Well worth a read.

  • Burning Chrome, William Gibson, 1986

    The dates are now, the technology is anachronistic, its dystopic urban landscape never materialized, but these short stories still feel real and urgent.

    College was a foreign world before smartphones or wifi, so Gibson’s landscape seemed merely a couple of left turns from being real. Our inner cities had not yet become the playground of the wealthy and the tech in his stories was more advanced than what we had on our desktops.

    Two decades have passed and his dystopia still seems frighteningly close to happening. We have much cooler toys in our pockets, but are we that far away from societal collapse? Even more terrifying is the threat of chaos, we’d now be backsliding into a dark age of decreased technological capacity.

    Progress is not inevitable, and my adulthood has straddled this book portending a future in both directions. Who knows where the future will land? Ultimately, the accuracy of his future-present is irrelevant. Gibson’s genius is in excavating our shared humanity within the heart of these tales.

    The enduring core of these stories is anchored in Gibson’s wistful tone. A more sophisticated reader would find this maudlin tone offputting, maybe too cute by half. Then again, I wasn’t very sophisticated in college when I first read this anthology and I’ve only softened up over time.

  • The Spoon

    My wife toasted a pan of sesame seeds to grind into a paste (which goes great with jam on toast).

    She mixed the seeds with a spoon to speed up the cooling and left the pan on the dinner table to cool.

    While playing around after dinner, the boy climbed onto a chair and grabbed a spoonful to taste.

    I saw him put the spoon in his mouth and sqauwked loudly to keep him from dipping the now-dirty spoon back into the seeds.

    He’s quite sensitive to being reprimanded and immediately started bawling.

    When my wife went up to him, he was blubbering about not wanting the spoon on the table.

    There’s a certain measure of truth to his complaint. After all, he couldn’t have misused the spoon if it wasn’t there in the first place!

  • Another year in the books

    We took down the tree yesterday, marking our official end of 2021.

    I had wanted to take it down on the first, but the kids lobbied an extra day, but we got sidetracked on Sunday and it was suddenly bedtime.

    Same for Monday. So I was going to take it down myself that night, but the kids insisted on being part of the process.

    So we took it down on Tuesday morning. I put on the Peanuts Christmas album in the background and we enjoyed our last party of the holiday season, taking down the ornaments, lights, and tree, punctuated by a breakfast halfway in between.

    A mundane event; a punctuation for the passage of time. I’ll get maybe ten more of these with my daughter (if she doesn’t grow out of it before heading off to college).

    2021 was again a strange year, but with the kids growing up fast, I suspect every year will be unique, whatever “normal” we settle into.

    So here’s to the next strange year. Let’s hope we make the most of it.

  • Another way to slice up my reading

    Last year I created a method to divide my unread books by categories (fiction, non-fiction, spirituality, self-help, art).

    Recently I’ve taken a different approach (most likely because we got an ebook reader, which made the entire world’s library easily accessible).

    I’ve started sorting my to-read list by era:

    • Ancient – Older than 500 years old
    • Almost Modern – 1492 to 1776
    • Modern – 1776-1945
    • Contemporary – 1945 onward.

    When I wrote the first draft, the reading list was:

    • Bhagavad Gita (1000 BCE)
    • Journey to the West (1592)
    • Walden (1854)
    • Oranges (1975), The Tao is Silent (1977), and a couple photography monographs

    I had a sneaking suspicion that something might change, but I thought this loose structure was another good way to create a cross-section through my library.

    Unfortunately, something did change. Since August, I’ve become obsessed (addicted) to an online implementation of the card game Magic the Gathering. Naturally, this has drastically reduced my reading time. I may need to quit that habit so I can go back to my old ways. Maybe an entertainment diet is in order for the new year.