In April Ranae and I had the great pleasure of seeing the U of M Museum of Art 's exhibition of the work of artist Andy Goldsworthy. Goldsworthy creates his art solely with materials he finds in nature, painstakingly arranging rocks, leaves, grass, ice, snow, and other tools into beautiful natural constructions. He is probably my favorite working modern artist; it's too bad this was his first exhibit on American soil.

The Haines Gallery has a small catalog of his work here: Andy Goldsworthy Work

After much delay (about three and a half months according to my Movable Type logs! :-/), I'm planning on actively posting again. Major and minor events of the last few months:

• Visited grandparents in Orlando
• Vacation/Karina's wedding in Miami
• Got engaged!
• Vacation/Shawn and Stacey's wedding in Playa del Carmen, Mexico

Being less compulsively online has afforded me more time for one of my main offline joys, reading. Some of the books I've finished recently:

• The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs
  A fantastic book, even over 40 years after it's original publication. The best book I've read on city life.
• The Man Who Ate Everything, by Jeffrey Steingarten
  A great book about food by the most interesting food critic writing today. I heard of this book via Meg and I'm better of because of it.
• Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino
  A cool little novel of dream-like descriptions of many fantastical cities. Strong Borgesian overtones.
• Hooking Up, by Tom Wolfe
• Sustainable Cuisine White Papers
  Very nicely packaged, and some interesting ideas presented here, but the white paper format quickly exposed its weaknesses. A few pages isn't really enough to generate a substantial argument, and some of the papers contradicted others outright in their prescriptions for sustainable cuisine. Too light for my tastes.
• Small Pieces Loosely Joined, by David Weinberger
• The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe
  This has been on my "to read" list for some time, and a week on the beach in Mexico is what it took for me to finally read it. A fascinating account of the birth of the psychedelic revolution. Made me realize that some extraordinarily interesting people were involved in Ken Kesey's loose circle in the 60's, like Stewart Brand and Paul Hawken, both great writers in their own rights.
• Natural Capitalism, by Paul Hawken (see above), and Amory and Hunter Lovins
  Oustanding, the best book on how to begin reversing the damage we've done to the environment, and one of the most inspirational books I've ever read.
• Human Natures, by Paul Ehrlich
  A great book about a great many things, mostly surrounding gene/culture coevolution in humans. Similar to Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel, but with more focus on culture and stronger social proscriptions. Highly recommended.

I have pushed this little link on many friends already, but it warrants posting here, because it is so funny! Dean Allen's review of recent wines. An excerpt:


The rest of Dean's site, Textism is similarly wonderful.

Very nice analysis here from Gareth about one of the most-overlooked aspects of the music-sharing debate: the (non-monetary) cost to users of the time they spend searching for music. Check out his article How To Make Money From Online Music (and make everybody better off in the process).

From his conclusions:



My contention has always been that for the segment of the music-seeking market which I belong to (admittedly the minority), the appeal of file-sharing services is NOT that the music can be downloaded for free. Rather, software tools like Kazaa and Soulseek drastically reduce our "search costs" for music, which is of great benefit even if downloads must be paid for. If one's tastes in music fall anywhere outside the mainstream artists which are aggressively marketed and saturate the airwaves, finding the artists and songs you'd most like can be a difficult and time-consuming process. File-sharing services can make it substantially easier to find this type of music. For this reason, initiatives like Apple's new iMusic service can be successful despite charging users for downloads (currently at the rate of $0.99 a track).