If you read one thing today, make it this fantastic vintage gem on the art of self-renewal, even timelier half a century later in our age of blind productivity.
Golf is a game to teach you about the messages from within, about the subtle voices of the body-mind. And once you understand them you can more clearly see your ‘hamartia,’ the ways in which your approach to the game reflects your entire life. Nowhere does a man go so naked.
The cabin, along with two large lodges and lots of other outbuildings is accessible only by boat after a rough ride or hike up the side of the mountain. Imagine my surprise to find a full-sized Steinway grand piano in the main room —in tune, too. The caretaker’s cabin is just big enough for a single bed, writing desk, chair, and fireplace. The door and window trim are made of spruce bark that has been peeled and soaked in the lake. When it softens enough it is laid to dry flat and used for ‘sprucing’ up around the doors and windows, so to speak.
The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although, in almost all men, obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates. In this action, it is genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man. In its essence, it is progressive. The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they, — let us hold by this. They pin me down. They look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates.
The American Scholar – Emerson’s legendary 1837 oration. (via explore-blog)
...provokes interesting questions about "what is happiness?"...
Apparently the face recognition software is sophisticated enough to distinguish the wry smile from the orthodox "happy" one. But I wonder whether people with the sun in their eyes - squinting - will be picked up as smiling because of the rise in their cheeks?!
Presumably the MIT folks know what they're doing. Their leader, Joicihi Ito, is a legend (I watched a video of his, about the Media Lab, on Edge.org - worth a look folks).
As my mate Blair used to say to his late Jack Russel, Dram, "getinbehind...!!!"
Click here to donate. Even a meagre Kiwi peso will suffice (they're edging closer to their $5k fundraising target, to get this thing in print - around $4.4k last time I checked).
These Wullington folks, from Nu Zillin, are my people. Common People. (Which strangely enough brings to mind that rousing Pulp track of the same name).
It would be this nerd’s absolute dream come true if books grew on trees. But until that happens, Berlin has found a brilliant Giving Tree-esque solution, using fallen trees’ trunks as a free book exchange. Part of the BookCrossing book swap club, which brings free books to public spaces around the globe based on their idea of building the World’s Library! Neighborhood residents are welcome to leave a book they loved, or take one from the plastic protected hutches cut into the tree trunks.
It's little initiatives like this that truly inspire me to come up with other ways to make our lives more social, to have a positive impact on the people in my environment. How would you enhance your community, if you could be bothered?!
What makes Pine Valley, "Pine Valley"? Part II: The Course, Obviously.
Recently I made love to Pine Valley.
That is to say I experienced her with all my senses, drunk in her aromas, sounds, explored her nooks and crannies – essentially, became one with her. Our orgy was of the nature of surfer and wave, of rider and powder bowl. Ego played no part. The experience was as spiritual as it was sensual as it was awe inspiring. Golf, as we well know, can take us on some quite fantastic journeys. This was one of them.
So what is it about this infamous Neverland in the Jersey pine barrens that stirs so potently? Well, in Part I we explored some of the ‘other things’ which make a visit to PV so treasured. Theirs is a wonderful background music, a faint melody - a worthy accompaniment, to be sure. It is the centre-piece of the experience, however, the course itself, which elevates a Pine Valley adventure into the most lucid of human endeavours. But what of it?
Above all, it’s the drama of the place. Drama may be a word that’s overused in golf literature, so let me go further. There are two forces constantly at play which, together, create a profound sense of exhilaration as you perambulate the holes. I’m talking about mystique and peril.
I suspect this is more the case now than it’s ever been, with the forest having grown in so densely in the past century. Black and white photographs taken during the course’s infancy show a remarkably more open, sandy landscape, across which other holes could more easily have been spotted. I forget whether one of Crump’s design principles dictated that other holes should not be visible from the one you’re playing (I remember, for example, that he was keen on the idea that no more than two consecutive holes should play in the same direction), but in any case that’s now more or less the de facto result, if not the intended one. I hasten to add though – something I’ll come back to later – that the playing corridors are nonetheless very wide indeed.
Allied to mystique is the sense of isolation. In the world there is just you, five other men and the flora and fauna around you – nothing and no one else, or so it seems. For me, paradoxically, this has two opposite effects. The primary feeling is one of tranquility, of peace with one’s lot. But the secondary feeling is – at least, can be – one of acute pressure. Little need be said about the first, save to say that it’s delightfully therapeutic. The second might be more interesting. Contrast the golfer standing over his ball at Pine Valley with his counterpart at, say, Dornoch or Westward Ho! The latter will almost certainly be peering now and then across the links at other tortured golfers, out to gulls hovering above the deep blue sea, over at livestock in a neighbouring field – and realising, consciously or otherwise, that we’re all in this together! All the other souls he can see, can sense, are living their lives with all manner of pains and pleasures – and yet the world keeps spinning. At the Valley time stands still and, at the moment you address your ball, a far graver presence is felt to be looking on.
Then there is the omnipresent and imminent peril. Danger is all around. To say that Pine Valley is the hardest golf course in the world is, in my view, a crude and misleading half-truth. On those hopeless days when one hasn't the faintest idea in which direction the next shot is likely to veer, it can be the hardest (Good) golf course in the world. But to say so doesn't reveal much. For the most part, with its wide fairways and big greens – by square footage, if not always by appearance – the course offers the golfer ample room to stray, albeit with implications in each case for what he must attempt next. It’s when he pushes his luck just a little too far that the chancer gets his comeuppance; and if he’s not careful, that comeuppance will be delivered in a snowballing sequence of doom previously unimaginable to the guy who one day picked up a stick and ball and didn’t know what he was in for. Like the hand that giveth and taketh away, she is just as comfortable handing out elation as she is humility. At Pine Valley one can really be humbled in spades.
The intersection of mystique and peril – and thus the embodiment of Pine Valley’s character – is the bunkering. It’s otherworldly and down right terrifying. Building on entirely sandy soil, Crump and his cronies had the luxury of gouging pits wherever they pleased. The result is an assembly of graves of all shapes and sizes, quite literally the most harrowing and the most mesmerising collection you will have the privilege to see anywhere. There are vast sandy areas (like the infamous Hell’s Half Acre on seven), corridors four feet wide and six feet deep, steep faces, shallow faces, deep sand, next-to-no sand, mine shafts and so on and so forth. Particular favourites are the crescent shaped corridor fifty yards to the right of the thirteenth green, the quarries either side of the eighth green, the veritable half pipe that sits menacingly to the left of the eighteenth green and, of course, the Devil’s Asshole, wonderful creation that it is. I mustn’t leave out the smattering of coffin bunkers to the right of number two which, from above, must appear to have been produced by the firing of a giant shotgun. You really could just walk the eighteen holes, without clubs, and have a field day admiring the bunker work alone, so engaging is it to the human faculties. (To admire them to the same degree having hacked your way eventually out of them will require a greater strength of character).
I needn’t remind you that the bunkers are only the beginning of the errant golfer’s problems. Fates yet more treacherous lurk beyond, in the woods. Quite rightly in my view, if you’re sufficiently offline as to find yourself standing in the trees (save your protestations: if you were in the trees, you were ‘sufficiently offline’), the escape will seldom be a straightforward one. On the contrary, you’ll often have to pitch out sideways – if you can get club on ball, that is. (This happened to me on the seventh and I was not a little bit grateful to be standing on the fairway, albeit still 300+ yards out, playing my third). There are well-worn stories of souls emerging from a given hole not so much scathed as completely obliterated, double figures recorded on the scorecard if it hasn’t yet been torn up. Famously Gene Littler took something like an eight on the par three fifth hole then refused to play on unless the TV producers (it was a Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf match) promised not to air footage of his fall from grace. These are the tales on which Pine Valley’s feared reputation is perpetuated.
There’s water, too, but not much of it. The only time it comes into play – or should come into play – is the troublesome fourteenth hole, a sharply downhill par three of some two hundred yards, or perhaps the approach to the eighteenth if you’re a short hitter or coming from a tricky lie. It plays a cosmetic cameo role on the likes of five, fifteen and sixteen, but no more than that.
It may be misleading to talk of peril on the greens because, although they’re heavily contoured and, to borrow a bowling term from cricket, medium-fast, they are far from ‘tricked up’ – and, as one would expect, they run true. The golfer thus can rarely have cause to feel hard done by, as far as his putter is concerned. Certainly there are places you do not want to find yourself (like too far above the hole on the fifth, the sixth, the eighth, the eleventh or the seventeenth!), but with such sober caddies and so much room to play with, there really are no excuses. And in any case, he who does find himself the wrong side of a few ridges, far from justified in feeling dejected, should rather take the sort of childish delight in the challenge that his younger brothers-in-golf do 3500 miles away on the Himalayas Putting Green by the West Sands at St. Andrews! Cross-country putting is such fun.
Speaking of fun, it would be remiss of me not to highlight one of the essential elements of the course that makes golfing at PV so deliciously thrilling: the constant changes in elevation. At times they are subtle, at others brutal. From the constant climbing and tumbling two things follow. The first is the most obvious, being the thrill factor, the drama, the exhilaration, the wide-smile-across-the-face-before-you-draw-the-club-back feeling (such as is acutely felt at the likes of Fishers Island, Sunningdale, Essex County, Somerset Hills, Ballybunion, Lahinch and Brookline, among many others). This may be most keenly felt on the par threes (three and ten play somewhat downhill, fourteen plays severely downhill, and five plays horrendously uphill), although the same can be said for the short approach to number two, the third slug up into the fifteenth, the pitch up to seventeen and the final blow of the day into the home green.
As a Scot and a lover of blind (and semi-blind) shots I get as much pleasure, maybe more, from playing up hill as I do playing down. Most golfers on the other hand salivate at the sight of their ball hanging higher, for longer than it would normally. There’s a heroic quality in the air in these moments. Your ball striking must be pure, your judgment finely calibrated – more so than when playing on flat land. The golfer that mishits his ball enough to fall short of a green (or indeed flushes his ball with too much adrenalin and flies a green) will then find himself a beneficiary of the second consequence I alluded to above. That is to say, he will be confronted with a shot – chip, pitch, flop, splash, whatever – that, nine times of ten, will require a good deal of imagination. In short, it’s fun missing greens at PV because the next shot is never a straightforward chip from an even lie across a flat green. PV’s greens are islands perched up above sandy waste areas or sunk into hillsides. They’re very big as I said, so it’s reasonable that they’re closely bordered by devilry of some form or another. If you are fortunate enough to find your ball resting on grass, chances are you either didn’t miss by much (the ‘fringes’ – if rough, rather than fairway, can be called a ‘fringe’ – are shallow) or you bailed out by some margin (say, to the right on twelve or thirteen). More often than not you’ll be pitching from scrub; or nipping, splashing, putting or rescuing from one of the aforementioned sandy graves. They’re shots you’re not likely to be used to playing at your home course and, in that sense, they’re tremendous fun. And because of the elevation changes, you’ll probably be playing more of them than you would normally, too.
The constant elevation changes also feed into the aforementioned mystique too, in that you’re constantly wondering what’s up there (trust in your caddy is one thing, seeing for your own eyes is another) and what it feels like to be all the way down there (after you’ve peered down from on high, tumbled through the woods and re-emerged in a clearing that now seems even closer to the earth’s core, having looked back up, than you at first imagined). It’s comparable I expect with the feeling mountaineers must have when on their adventures. And it’s exhilarating.
Now, all this lyrical wax has dripped from a very general candle, little having been said about particular holes that leave a lasting impression and the minute details that make it so. There are two reasons for this. First, and most significantly, all eighteen holes at Pine Valley are quite brilliant, most tending towards perfection. The task of picking out standouts therefore borders on the thankless. I may have my own favourites – between you and me: one, two, four, six, seven, eight, ten, thirteen, sixteen – but those preferences are only very slight over others, my affection for all of them very great. How, for example, could you leave out heroic holes like five, fourteen and fifteen from such a list? Or the sometimes overlooked holes like nine and eleven? Second of all, you really have to play these holes to appreciate them. I can’t describe them for you. Perhaps Darwin or Longhurst could do them justice, maybe Warren Wind. The few photos Google throws up will give you something of an idea of what lies across the railroad tracks. There is an element of reverence, I must say, in my unwillingness to go further, a tacit acknowledgment that something is too beautiful, too complex, to be reduced to words. In this case I must accept the present difficulty and yield to it.
Before I leave you, it would be terribly unbalanced of me not to say a critical word or two from the opposite benches. There’s not much to say in truth, but there are one or two things I’d change if, heaven forbid, I was in charge. When asked why the club retained Tom Fazio as the consulting architect – rather than, say, Bill Coore or Tom Doak – my host replied rather cryptically that Tom had been a great friend to the club for a good many years, and that he had been kind enough never to send it a bill. He then added that Tom may well be responsible for a lot of grass at PV which probably shouldn’t be there. Whether it’s Fazio or someone else that’s responsible, I would agree - there is a little too much grass. This criticism has several dimensions to it. First, though I’m a great believer in wide playing corridors, some of them at PV (I’m aware this might be close to blasphemous) might even be a little too wide. Sure, the penalties are harsh if you miss them, but in many cases, and particularly if you just play the whites rather than blues, it can seem pretty dam hard to miss them. Second, the fairways are a little lush for my tastes, or at least a little soft around the few green entrances into which you can run an approach shot. This leads me to my other – and primary – criticism of Pine Valley: there is too little room for the running game. Certainly at least there are less opportunities to play running approaches than you’ll find at PV’s English heathland cousins, not least its closest cousin (nay, sister), Sunningdale. One can probably run one into numbers four, five, six, nine, eleven, twelve, thirteen and sixteen – though on most of these holes it might feel contrived to do so. Perhaps it's indicative that I didn’t attempt one running shot when I was there in July despite the fact that I have a remarkable propensity (verging on stupidity) for doing so?
In committing this short collection of thoughts to paper I have necessarily left others out. This is inevitable. I have a million things to say about Pine Valley but my time and your patience are both finite creatures. My only hope is that the paragraphs above give you some insight into golf at the Valley that you didn’t have before, or that at least they’ve given you some reason to disagree with me. Far from being a definitive account of a golf course that’s greater than any one man’s (indeed, all men's) interpretation, they profess to be no more than a gathering of my prejudices. To you they may be incoherent, incomplete or down right offensive. To me they have been a joy to share, for they have transported me back to a very happy day indeed. If you haven’t yet had the chance to play Pine Valley, I hope that some day your time will come.
I'm no paranoid android, ladies and gentlemen. But I am present to the fact that when you open Firefox (or your other preferred internet browser, as appropriate) and visit a website - any website - it almost certainly has consequences. Someone is paying attention to your every move.
(As much was reinforced for me once again this morning when I'd spent an hour or two bringing myself up to speed - online, of course - on trends in microblogging, social media, collaborative consumption and the like. I came across several innovative outfits like Local Projects, Wander, Hovding, Whipcar and Stamen Design. But the hilarious moment came when I was about to post a link to this Tumblog and saw that a good looking girl with some Belgian-sounding alias was now "following me". Naturally I clicked on her profile and, after a few seconds, realised that she was somehow connected to - and in some way promoting - a social media crowd called "we heart it". The name and the let's-try-to-create-the-new-"Tweet" idea jarred instantly, which was all the more ironic / funny / serendipitous because only half an hour prior I read this NY Times article).
I must say that, for now at least, my reaction is primarily amusement over objection, or worse, anxiety. Let them monitor, I say. They'll always employ people that are light years smarter than me to devise ways to turn me into data - and that's just fine; it would be futile, I think, to fight it.
I remember this coming out in '97 (a big year for me - our family got our first taste of paradise, that is, New Zealand, through a six-month exchange with another family; and infinitely more significantly, we went to Disneyland in Florida).
Funny to reflect on the impact the 'song' had on me back then, vis the thoughts and emotions it has now, fifteen years on! I do find the inevitability of life amusing.
vaporwave
prguitarman
pixelskylines
turnnoffyourmind
jimmyeatworldofficial
blakekathryn
