Cards, Books, and Clay

The St.Louis cardinals won the World Series. It made the front page of BBC news international. Game 6 against the Texas Rangers was supposed to be one of the best baseball games in history. They didn't riot here, but during the game, you could stand outside and hear a common roar at the game highlights.

I think its fantastic that people get worked up over their local sports teams. Because people feel loyal to a particular team, there's this sense of communal attachment to place, of ownership. It's not the cardinals winning the world series, its our cardinals. When there's this kind of ownership, it activates the relationship between the city/community and the individual. By identifying yourself with the St.Louis cardinals, you also identifying yourself as a St.Louisian, a member of the city who has ownership/responsibility/kindred to the city, even if in a very superficial way.

Myself, I've never cared about the local sports teams, and my home happens to be where I sleep at night.

I enrolled in a 1 credit workshop over the weekend in land forming, taught by one of the professors in the nascent landscape architecture program at Wash U. The class is actually a very expensive hand workout program. We started by purchasing a week's worth of groceries worth of clay. Not just any clay:

Only Roma Plastilina. No substitutes. Number 2. Not sculpey. Not white. Not brown. Yes. It stinks. It is expensive. It gets everywhere. I know.
If you are allergic to sulphur, please contact Blick about a suitable alternative such as Prima.
It does not dry, so you can use it forever.
To soften it before use, you can cut it into slabs and put it under an incandescent bulb. Do not put it in the microwave. It will never be the same (the microwave or the clay).

Apparently it's the industry standard used by professional sculptors mostly because it never dries out and it holds it shape pretty well.  Which is good, because I never want to buy any more ever again. The stuff is really quite hard. It's about as hard as a cold stick of butter. The only thing we did for two hours last night was to cut our bricks of clay up and make a level base out of it. Laborious work. People talked about how sore their hands were this morning when they came in. Because it contains sulphur, my hands reek of it that does not go away with washing.

I kind of like it as a material though. The firmness of the clay means you can get really precise with it, and if you really work it into a surface smooth, it becomes glassy and nearly reflective. Today, we took our base and made two primitives- a small low, four sided pyramid, and a conical pit which intersected the pyramid, so it looked like the conical pit was excavating the pyramid from the base. We spent hours doing this. I got up at 8 this morning, hung over and tired, and hauled my sorry butt to school to spend the entire day working with this clay model. In the afternoon, once we were happy with our work, we destroyed it, and started over, this time making whatever landform we wanted to.

In a sense, its kind of theraputic to do this kind of mindless, intuitive, manual labor. In another sense, its a terrible idea considering our midreview this friday and the video we're supposed to make etc. etc.
I do hope that the sulphur smell goes away though.

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I got my passport book today in the mail. It's the new one, the one with the chip inside. The chip doesn't bother me as much as the graphic content of the passport. The pages of the new American passports are twenty pounds of contrived nationalistic imagery in a five pound bag. In 14 pages, I counted six bald eagles, not including the bald eagle watermark on every page. Yes, America as a social and governmental experiment has got some great points, but you don't see the Italians issuing passports made of pasta.

The other thing that irritates me about the new passports is that because each page is so luridly colored and completely covered with simpering imagery, any stamps you get are totally washed out. I liked the old passports because you could vaugely make out the state seals, but the primary focus was on the stamps. Now, all attention is on the majesty of the bison of the great plains with the farmer driving the plow while the waves of grain flow around the aloof and watchful head of the freedom-loving bald-eagle.

When I get to describe our trial by jury system to my Chinese classmates who don't have that right, that gets me choked up. When I remember that people are presumed innocent when brought to trial, that gets me choked up. When people who tell me that the economic system in the US is run by pathological corporations and special interest groups then tell me that it can be changed by public political action, that gets me choked up. So don't expect me to get dewy eyed with jingoistic fervor with this 'Independence day parade in small town America' crap.