Here is a 38-second YouTube video of the cloth I’m working on flapping in the wind during a boat ride this past week. Watch for the moon.
The white bands of stitching were added to the moon’s surface last night. More needs to be done to stop that off-white square from resembling a Triscuit. Triscuits look woven. So was this:
Yesterday, K. and I finished watching the spell-binding first season of ‘True Detective’ — a Louisiana murder mystery with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. Holy cow! The sociopath was deviously smart and a worthy opponent of two driven and clever detectives. The creep could do voices, accents, and evade capture for decades. But he also made these very cool pagan-influenced twig and rag and bone sculptures that I just loved (think: Andy Goldsworthy). It was odd to be enamored of the evil character’s creations.
In looking for an image from the show, I came across this: “ruin porn“. I understand the magnetic pull of run down and decrepit structures. In ‘True Detective,’ the central ruin was a former plantation — complete with greying, rotting big house, rickety slave shacks, and an underground fort. These sets were beyond creepy, and yet mesmerizing, proving, I suppose the “ruin porn” article’s point. (For the record, they went overboard with the piles of broken, vacantly-staring dolls. They were not needed to create the ambiance). See add on paragraph below about set design.
My cousin Ginny Mallon (photographer/painter/blogger) has been exploring all kinds of ruination, especially along coastlines. Most recently she photographed Dead Horse Bay, which is in Brooklyn near the Marine Parkway Bridge. Its beach, “Bottle Beach” is so full of garbage from such a long span of time, that it’s considered a ‘living museum of trash’. Inexplicably, her photos of the garbage are gorgeous.
Driving from Newton to Brookline today, I almost stopped to photograph a robust rose bush spilling over with vermilion flowers. It screamed ‘summer’. It was beautiful. This is almost the exact opposite impulse of the one I documented a few weeks back — the desire to shoot pictures of parking lots, guard rails or gas stations, in part to upend a narrow sense of what constitutes ‘beauty’.
I guess I am allowed to feel both urges. This door was captured about a year ago after fabric shopping in Arlington, I think.
Debbie’s comment inspired me to find out who designed the sets for ‘True Detective’. His name is Joshua Walsh and you can read about him here. The ‘vulture’ blog post had this to report: “’He’s the son of a family that ran a funeral home, and he’s an avid hunter and taxidermist — basically, the perfect dude for the job,’ DiGerlando told Vulture.”
I had just commented below that Louisiana itself is a landscape of ruination, and one we’ve seen before in ‘True Blood’ and ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’. It is was no surprise to discover that Walsh also did the set design for ‘Beasts’.
