#communal

[justadandak]

A simple site to ‘draw a fish’ then explore if it will swim (with others).

[marvelouslandofoz]

MARVELOUS NEEDS ARTISTS!

[howifeltabouthim]

'When one has been granted the privilege of inheriting all this, it seems only right to share it with others to some small degree, does it not?'

Mary Balogh, from The Secret Pearl

[endlessandrea]

Maggie Nelson on Fred Moten‘s Black and Blur

[bootleg-b0i]

Living in America is like. It’s just so dangerous to be virtually any type of person whatsoever that the like, 200 guys who’s lives aren’t actually being threatened all the time are easily able to make a billion million trillion dollars because they’re the only ones not dead or dying, and then they all make rules about how to keep it this way forever, or even make it worse!

[twin-rabbit]

Culture on the Wall

Freddy Mamani's "Neo-Andean" always puts me in mind of the 30s Pueblo Deco movement that I love. I get what Mamani is doing, with all the gregarious interiors and high contrast façades. Nobody would accuse his work of being subtle. I also really like his justification of an exuberant act of self-expression by Bolivia’s long-marginalized indigenous majority following the election of Morales. That said I feel like Pueblo Deco ends up getting left out, despite actually having a related backstory in indigenous self-expression, given it's more aggressive contemporary cousins. It deserves more attention.

Most people, if they know Pueblo Deco today, probably know the version from the tower of terror at Disney California Adventure, but it has its roots way back in 1905. Mary Colter was a big name in it, who based it a little on Lakota art, but mostly from hiring artists from the local Pueblo in Santa Fe to do a lot of the craftwork on some of her first building contracts. Her "Fred Harvey Room" at Union Station in LA is a great example of the kind of Native-infused, deceptively simple style she and they basically invented.

Granted, compared to what Mamani's got going on it feels tame, but if ya look at the accents on the walls the colors and patterns aren't entirely unrelated.

Although one of her first buildings, the La Fonda (now La Fonda on the Plaza, in Santa Fe) is probably the clearest example of what most later Pueblo Deco architects were inspired by as far as exteriors were concerned.

Of course, like anything, once it got popular it got out of hand and once the Native craftworkers were sidelined the aesthetic became almost a parody of itself. Like this quasi-Egyptian mural "The Legend of the Sun" by Maynard Dixon, at the AZ Biltmore. The building got some consultation from Frank Lloyd Wright and boy does it show.

It... It's a lot.

But so long as Natives were still on the payroll, Pueblo Deco had some amazing stuff to offer. This is the Watchtower at the Grand Canyon. The primary art work was by Fred Kabotie, a fairly famous Hopi artist. Trust me, expand the images. The thumbnails can't do the work justice.

As said, Neo-Andean also has bright as hell colors going for it. Pueblo is a lot more subdued, but that's as much due to the preferred color schemes for the period (and the expense of bright paints at the time) as anything, and a big part of the appeal of Pueblo was how efficient and inexpensive it was. Granted that's also the justification for early Brutalism but hopefully you'll agree Pueblo Deco is simultaneously more fun and more inviting.

That said, there's recent artists also drawing on trad styles to create some really impressive buildings, that go a different direction than Mamani, but still create visually arresting locations. The varieties one can find can be pretty easily exemplified in contrasting the Poeh Cultural Center in NM by George Rivera and Joel McHorse Jr, and the Minneapolis American Indian Center's "woven wood" exterior by Ojibwe artist George Morrison.

Doing more with less. Similarly, unlike standard Deco, Pueblo is quite satisfying for those looking for less of the stark severity. As a side note, together with Streamline Moderne they gave birth to Googie (also called Populuxe or Doo-Wop), which eventually gave us the architecture in the Jetsons and the Fallout Series. So, in a way the image most Americans have when they picture "futuristic" (or the destroyed version of same in a lot of dystopias) is a bastardized version of a much more integrative and naturalistic style created by some Natives and one of the first woman professional architects, way back in 1910.

That said, Googie has its own selling points. The flowing lines terminating in sharp angles, the starbursts, the very much not Classical palette. But there's an implied naturalness to it. Rolling hills ending in a sudden drop is basically anywhere there's a creek-cut on the plains.

The seeming incongruity of the toothed awning of Ships Coffee is easily reminiscent of the cross beams of a pueblo, or the ribs of a flower. The style wears its inspiration on its sleeve. Tellingly several Googie designers cut their teeth under Frank Lloyd Wright, since Prairie Style and Pueblo Deco are basically siblings. Funny Colter doesn't get a shoutout on the wikipedia page, but Wright does.

Frustratingly though, what got fictionalized and then put back out into reality, was anything but what Kabotie and Colter originally created. Hell, the Jetsons took it to such an extent literally every building is up on stilts as far away from nature as possible. Plants and stone become accent pieces instead of base forms. Disney's "House of Tomorrow" and Fuller's Dymaxion get top billing, and ya gotta get a Mamani showing up to finally edge the needle back the other way.

Just by way of example, when one types "solar punk" into google what often shows up is definitely favoring one vision over the other.

It's "love of nature" but abstracted and sanitized. Not all of it is Tron rewritten by Wood Elves, but there's enough the bias is pretty clear.

[Also, what is with all the height? Super-elevated walkways, honeycomb skyscrapers 80 floors tall, the weird obsession with selling people on vertical farming... Euro-inflected visions of the future seem unnecessarily terrified of the ground.]

Unfortunately, and ironically, a bunch of Colter's originals are now demolished, as often as not to make way for more cars. She designed a lot of railroad buildings (the US now hates trains), and her non-train-related work like the El Navajo was leveled to widen Route 66. Pueblo Deco deserves better, maybe a little bit of revival, the ideal meeting the material. Colter and those Native artisans did some cool shit that deserves to live again.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

busy market in Vrindavan, India by Katrin Korfmann

* * * *

The real act of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete social actions well: disagreeing without poisoning the relationship; revealing vulnerability at the appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to end a conversation gracefully; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; knowing how to let someone down without breaking their heart; knowing how to sit with someone who is suffering; knowing how to host a gathering where everyone feels embraced; knowing how to see things from another’s point of view.

~David Brooks

(Book: How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen)

(Philo thoughts)