birthday flowers

Half the year has whizzed by already. I've never been so busy in all my life. For a while there I was officially doing a few too many big things at once. Now I'm only doing one big thing at once. What a relief! Well, relatively speaking. My summer writing schedule is insane. I handed in a manuscript draft on July 15th. The editor’s comments are due back July 21st. That leaves six days in between for dental procedures, doctor’s appointments, grant applications and various other overdue paperwork, banking, random socializing and oh I don’t know maybe a bit of summer vacation.

Our friend Adriana has been visiting Montreal from Mexico for four months now and we have barely seen her. She has to leave soon. We made plans to get together. We would have loved to have taken her out of the city to see a bit of countryside but alas we had no time or money or car. But surely there was something somewhere in the city that she hadn't done yet? She said what she really wanted to do was to go see Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome, but she thought I'd probably done that a hundred times already. Nope, I'd never done that in all the 18 years I've lived in Montreal!



Pre-excursion research indicated that Buckminster Fuller was born on July 12th 1895. I was not surprised at all to hear that he was kicked out of Harvard twice. We summer birthday folks have a hard time with conventional thinking. Adriana and I went to see the geodesic dome he built for Epxo 67 on July 17th 2008, 113 years and five days after his birthday. My birthday is July 18th. Adriana is leaving town on July 22nd. It all worked out very well, mathematically speaking.

I've seen the dome from a distance of course, but never up close and personal. We got so inside the thing as to be able to see how the joints are made. Now we know how to make a geodesic dome of our own. Why I waited 18 years to do this I don’t know. Not only is Bucky's dome amazing, but it's also on an island. This means that when you go see it you are magically transported to another world. Parc Jean-Drapeau is quiet and cool. A secret garden, a real marvel, replete with waterfalls and lily ponds traversed with curved footbridges a la Monet and everything. I took dozens of pictures. If Monet had had a digital camera everything would have turned out differently.



Adriana was a marvellous companion. We picnicked under the dome and took whichever footbridges came our way and spent ages peering into the murky shallows of one lily pond after another, admiring the fish and ferns and spiders and red winged blackbirds each with equal wonder. There’s a gigantic Alexander Calder sculpture in Parc Jean-Drapeau. Who knew? There are tree-lined paths along the river that – in the hot and humid haze of summer – look like works of the impressionist pointillist painter Seurat.

It’s great to get out of the city. Even for a few hours. From across the mighty Saint Laurence River Montreal looks far far away. For the price of a metro ticket you can hear the river lapping on the shore and hear the birds in the trees and feel free as one of them. And then, for the price of another metro ticket you can scoot back into town again and go to an art opening. We went to see Reverse Engineering - a first ever exhibition of works on paper by installation and intermedia artist, jake moore. Our Buckminster Fuller research perfectly prepared us for jake’s work.

Tree branches have been central objects in her practice for several years where they stand in for antennae and antlers representing both communication devices of the natural world and a metaphor for a kind of hierarchical learning strategy, “arboreal” referred to negatively by Deleuze and Guattari. Here, the same branches used in earlier installations have been measured, mapped and charted using the tools available in Hexagram Concordia’s rapid prototyping lab. In a somewhat perverse twist, the tools were not used to develop a new 3 dimensional iteration as they are intended but instead the wireframe models have been printed as the final works. They are indexical measures, or a cartography of the skin of these trees. Quite imperfect, as it is impossible to measure every surface of the tree - Shockingly complex, as the delicate linear quality of trees is revealed as a fractal and crystalline surface. They are abstractions made with rational means. jake moore

Even if you don’t have time to go see the geodesic dome first, check out jake more, Reverse Engineering at the fofa gallery at Concordia: http://fofagallery.concordia.ca/

I slept late the next morning, after all that fresh air. I woke up and thought I heard the doorbell downstairs ringing. Then a few minutes later I heard our doorbell, and figured out that the first doorbell had actually been our doorbell only I was asleep and just dreaming that I was a wake. It was Adrian at the door, bringing me birthday flowers. One was shaped exactly like a geodesic dome.



I usually agonize over what to do for my birthday for months in advance and then no matter what I plan it never works out because everyone is always out of town. This year I thought I had that problem solved. Some friends from New York were going to come up and visit us for my birthday but then their travel plans got high jacked by their work schedules. They’re still coming, but not till next weekend. This weekend I had no plans. A few evolved organically. Basically, friends came over for drinks. The 2boys were in town for my birthday for the first time ever! jake moore arrived in a polka dot dress bringing me yet more flowers and an artist’s book as a present. Alexis O’Hara also arrived in a polka dot dress and brought me an art book present. I attribute this coincidence to the full moon, the biggest polka dot of them all.



I’ve known jake moore for at least fifteen years now and have only just discovered that she knows the names of all the flowers. How delightful. How very clever. One of the flowers she brought for my birthday now arches elegantly over a statuette of Michelangelo's David perched on a stack of books on the shelf above my desk. It truly is a gift to have something so lovely to look at. Even after these flowers fade I'll have their after-image. Which will come in handy. Any day now the latest manuscript revisions will make their way back to me. I’ll spend the rest of the summer sitting right here staring at this spot.
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