Voyage of the Sea Donkey
You could call it Lake Effect radio. Sometimes things come about that deserve mentions of honor. One of these was the Voyage of the Sea Donkey (or Voyages de l'ane du mer dans la Nouvelle Monde, in the manner of a 18th century travelogue). WFMU Station Manager Ken Freedman using Skype, a laptop computer, iTunes and other small bits of consumer electronics broadcast his weekly show from a rowboat in the middle of Lake Owassa. Aided primarily by his two children. Lake Owassa is up in the wilderness portion of New Jersey not far from something called the Delaware water gap. For the project the boat is named, by his daughter, who reminded me a lot of my niece Nicole. A poster (a naval jack) was made. Pictures are taken (they're on his playlist for that day
Ken | Playlist | 20Aug08). It was a rare and lovely thing. Arraryed perhaps from the same feelings that led Issak Walton to write the Complete Angler. Or Melville to write Moby Dick. Which originally was intended to be a treatise on Fly Tying (Aye, its Armstrong's Edwin Woolly Bear, if you want to fish for the White Whale). In all a heroic effort of aesthetic sensitivity. This was one of the two things I thought of once I figured out what was going on: the line from the New Pornographer's song, the Bleeding Heart Show "the minimum - heroic." Carl Newman sings, but I think Dan Bejer wrote that song, and he got that line from somewhere else. It is a description of those occaisions when if a thing is to be done at all, the least that is to be done is everything.
The other thing I thought was that this was a quintessential Ego Leonard moment. Ego Leonard (9), if you recall this from last summer was a nine-foot tall plastic Lego minifig. Its Curricula Vitae, such as was known, was that in August of last year it washed up on a beach in the Netherlands, apparently after a round of Festivals in England and the Low Countries earlier in the summer. Reporters looking into the matter determined it appeared to have been fashioned in a Dutch art collection. There was a web site that cryptically explained its purpose
No real than you are. That web site still exists and indicates that Ego Leonard has his own exhibition at a gallery in Amsterdam currently. Ego Leonard - the oversized minifig - is supposed to be an ambassador from his world, the virtual, his portfolio to seek information on us and our world and inquire of us what beautiful things to admire we know of.
I was charmed by this simple idea and have tried to keep an increased aesthetic awareness to this web log when I can. Recently I got around to reading the book
Shipwrecks by Akira Yoshimura, set in a Japanese fishing village perhaps 400 years go. A book with a surprisingly strong aesthetic turn. The cover of this book is one of the seemingly random thumbnail images that grace the edges of this page. It currently links through to a scan of an illustrated card Tran brought back from Vietnam. When I finished the book I thought: was there a competing ethos between these? One a justifying beauty of observation and character. Against this with Yoshimura a way of comprehending the world called Mono No Aware. Which I'll describe here simply as a poignant and deep sense of things It would be amiss if I didn't tag something onto the end of this.  A Pteradactyl of some kind
The only part of my day free of flourescent lighting is my commute to work. A portion of this I have arranged to occur on a bike path along Northwest branch creek. I enter it about a mile north west of the geographical phenomenon that runs the length of the east coast called the fall line. At this point the creek has over many years cut down through sixty or so feet of bedrock to leave a wooded gorge. When I'm not too late for work I sometimes stop and take pictures, like this one from a few weeks ago. At about this same spot earlier in the summer while riding home one evening, I looked up and saw a very large buck looking down at me from the rim of the slope, silhouetted in the twilight. It's horns branched twice on each side of its head. "That is a big animal to be so comfortable a mile inside the beltway" I thought. "Hey" I called out to it "Look out I could be the the Hunter Gracchus for all you know". This information seemed to alarm it because at that point it lifted its front legs turned and bounded out of sight.
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