181. Flower Piano

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Trending towards Braudel

Today (that was) I worked Flower Piano at the Botanical Garden in Golden Gate Park (see HERE). It was a lovely event on a near perfect day, but there was very little for me to do. On what I consider a "good" day I fill around 30 bags of compost but today I only pulled two.

But that gave me time to think. I had been thinking about the origin of the bourgeois world order so was trying to work out a chronology with the Crusades, the Black Death, the Renaissance, and the Reformation. (Did you know that one of the most recent proposed causes for the Little Ice Age is reforestation following the Black Death in Europe and then again following the mass die-off in the Americas after 1492?) Then it occurred to me that I could fall back on Fernand Braudel and start with what he considered the origin of modern capitalism in the market fairs. (I have, once again, been unable to find the passage I'm recalling in Civilization & Capitalism. I don't even know which volume it should be in. Four months later: On a hunch I consulted not Braudel but A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne and found the passage I remembered. It is around page 209 in the Book about The Formation of the Bourgeoisie.) 

This is interesting because it reasserts the Jewish connection. (And thinking about that made me aware that I can't recall why the Jews were able to give credit when the other "People of the Book" couldn't. Also, it seems like futures could have been a brilliant work around for credit. Braudel starts (in my recollection, which I can't substantiate) with farmers needing credit to plant their crops, but buying the crop in advance wouldn't seem to involve credit -- though maybe futures would have been just as bad in some way I will never understand.)

It is interesting that capitalism as we know it today had its start in helping farmers plant their crops. It all seems so innocent.

Before I started my shift I had breakfast at the Pork Store again. I ended up sitting at the counter next to a person who must have decided he was a sullen, disheveled woman trapped in a man's body and decided to do something about it. My hair is longer than hers and, I believe, better looking. *Flips hair dismissively*

I so lucked out working Saturday in GG Park, yesterday and today have been typical summer days when the fog hasn't burned off anywhere near as far west as the park. Did I even write about the clouds that day? They were so lovely. We hardly ever see clouds in the summer, so there was the novelty, but beyond that they were just lovely little clouds. Not as high as cirrus but less substantial than the usual cumulus. Maybe stratocumulus? Undoubtedly related to some storm system out in the Pacific, but I didn't hear about an actual hurricane or anything spectacular. Just enough of a front to push aside the marine layer for a day or so.

Rattlesnakes & Pigeons

In a recent SciShow YouTube video (HERE) I learned that, thanks to Rattlesnake Roundups, today's rattlesnake is less likely to have a rattle. I'm imagining some conservative Arizona rancher reacting to this consequence of natural selection with, "Well damn, that Darwin fella might have been on to something after all." But that's just crazy talk.

Anyway, this morning I was waiting for a BART train at Powell Street Station -- so three floors underground with MuniMetro trains directly above and the shared mezzanine above that. There were at least three pigeons working the platforms down there, as they often do, and with rattle-less rattlesnakes in mind, I wondered if they might come to forsake the surface -- with all its hawks and unpredictable cars -- for a subterranean life. I know they can go from station to station riding inside trains because I've seen them do it. And since BART can't stop people eating on the platforms or on the trains, there will always be something for them to eat. Will we see a generation of pigeons who become traumatized by a space larger than a train station? (I doubt it.)

Climate

Yesterday it was over 100F in Portland, OR -- I heard on the radio as I nestled under my extra layer of comforter this morning. Also yesterday, I read the local fire department is planning a floating station on the Embarcadero where they dock their fireboats. These two bits of information go together, Because Global Warming. 

I've seen interesting floating building projects from the Netherlands (of course) and even Britain, but this is the first local project I've heard of besides houseboats. Which I don't understand. We are in the process of "redeveloping" Treasure Island (TI) -- a man-made island in the middle of the bay created for the 1939 World's Fair and intended as a location for an airport, but then taken over by the US Navy for WW2 and only recently returned to the City. TI could combine features of Venice with the best of today's floating building technology, but instead they seem determined to go with generic development that could be anywhere. Perhaps the fire station idea will at least get people thinking about the option of having buildings rise with rising sea level rather than attempting to keep the sea always at bay. (ha)

Dwell

Without a book to read, I'm finally catching up with the latest Dwell magazine. What I like about Dwell is that so many of the houses are for the architects themselves. They may be a little stark, but they are usually interesting. I did have to laugh just now when I read about the decision of an architect couple to boldly paint the interior of their Brooklyn townhouse... white. Really thinking outside the box there. 

The last house I read about is from around here, but on the other side of the Oakland Hills. It is by an architect but the clients merely gave him freedom and a large budget to work with. I have to say I really like the house, it's mostly Cor-ten steel and glass on the outside and bare wood inside, the mezzanine layout is inspired by Le Corbusier's Unité -- which was referenced but not shown. (Are all Dwell readers familiar with architecture to this extent or is the magazine satisfied to leave many of their readers in the dark? Those architecture survey classes I took in college, in retrospect, could have been titled, "Preparation For Consuming Dwell and The Like.")

Not only is this house in Orinda stunning to look at, it is "sustainable" in all the check list ways: Solar panels; Rainwater catchment for everything but potable needs; Over insulated (and, while they don't mention it, I'm sure it's seismically sound.) Of course describing this as sustainable makes me gag given that it is also a huge house for four people in a location that requires automobile use for everything.

But then I look at Tiny House videos and think I could do better with less.

Next - 182. Of this and that