baby got a new body.

Nikon body, that is. The D70 was four years old -- it was time for something new.

It arrived early last week: finally had a chance to take it out for a run today.

more stories of nice men & odd places where I have cried

more stories of nice men & odd places
where I have cried
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

After coffee I set out for Lakeview Cemetery -- I hope to see the stones I had set this summer for my Great Aunt and Great Great Grandmother -- and on my meander back to Denny I realized I was right on top of Immanuel Lutheran Church, which my grandmother attended as a little girl when she lived with her family in that same hollow that has now blossomed around REI. Then it was residential, and thick with freshly imported Norwegian immigrants. This discovery meant that the swank cafe in which I drank my coffee stood on the site of the laundromat where my great grandmother had worked, earning ten dollars a week (the men made 20), to support her three children, her mother, her sister, and her shell-shocked uncle.

They were very thin.

I parked at the curb and approached the church. It was open, and the nice man inside said sure I could see the sanctuary. He led the way.

I didn't expect that an empty building I have never been in would prompt me to burst into tears that way.

I fled to the balcony so as not to make a spectacle of myself, but that was only worse. When I attended church with Grama as a girl in her Burien neighborhood we were often late, and we would sneak into the balcony, quiet like a secret. I adored the nest it made around us and the view from above.

It took some doing but I settled myself down after a lot of poking around (holga to come). Thanking the nice man for his kindness, I headed for my exit.

He asked me when was she here? And led me to a stand with photos of confirmation classes going back into the 1920s. We found Grama's name listed in the class of 1933, but I couldn't pick out her face in the photo, even after we moved it toward the light coming through the stained glass.

Which is all right. Mr. Stiffarm (which was his name) took my name and address and said he would ask the pastor to send me a copy.

I believe that he will, but even if it doesn't arrive, I have all that I need.

Posted by cameraphone from Seattle.

plus c'est la même chose

plus c'est la même chose
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

The new Vivace location in the little retail hollow carved out
by REI just off Denny Ave in Seattle has a curved inner room
that resembles the old roaster room from the Capital Hill
location.[1] But no roaster. Instead, more linoleum tables for
coffee dosers, but the majority of these are a rich velvety
crema brown, made to suit it seems, unlike the old place
which was a hodgepodge of found retro kitchen remnants.

If I recall correctly, that stash was transported down to the
North end of Broadway where the new cafe went in when
the imminent light rail forced the old one from it's South Broadway
location.

Which is fine, and the coffee's still sublime.

Plus ça change.

Posting by cameraphone from Seattle.

[1] which was the where of this what:
suttonhoo.blogspot.com/2007/11/speaking-of-effigies.html

morning has broken

morning has broken
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Posting by cameraphone
from Seattle, WA.

sushi maki I adore you

sushi maki I adore you
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Stopped here first thing after touching down at SeaTac because 1) they're 10 minutes from the airport, 2) it's 10 o'clock my time and 3) all I managed earlier today was an oatmeal at O'Hare.

I'm famished.

Sushi Maki was sustenance to me and my family when we held vigil up the road at the hospital with Grama this last summer. I was thrilled to see the Open sign still on at a quarter past 8, but my heart dove to my toes when I saw the posted hours read 8PM close.

Only here's what's wonderful: the nice man stayed open for me, and even said "of course, sit down, I'll get you some tea."

Which I am now drinking happily.

Please eat here the next time you're near: they're lovely.

Posting by cameraphone from
Sushi Maki
15710 1st Ave South
Burien, WA

simple pleasures

Kafka was a slightly strange man. He used to come to our house, sit and talk with my mother, mainly about his writing. He did not talk a lot, but rather loved quiet and nature. We frequently went on trips together. I remember that Kafka took us to a very nice place outside Prague. We sat on a bench and he told us stories. I remember the atmosphere and his unusual stories. He was an excellent writer, with a lovely style, the kind that you read effortlessly.

Alice Herz-Sommer of London, formerly of Prague, who is 106 years old and the last living friend of Franz Kafka. As reported in I Look at the Good in Haaretz.com.

Imagine: To travel to a very nice place outside Prague. To sit on a bench. To listen to Kafka tell you a story.

(Imagine that.)


Sommers also speaks of how music saved her life »

fringe benefits

One of the advantages of posting content via Creative Commons licensing on Flickr is that, when one of my images is used and credited, I learn about things I wouldn't have learned about otherwise.

For example: The University of Southern California just released a report on The Economic Benefits of Immigrant Authorization in California. The report:

measures the benefits that would accrue to the state and the nation if the currently unauthorized Latino workforce in California were legalized. CSII researchers used a conservative economic model that accounts for the wage “penalty” incurred by the undocumented, assumes a very slow increase in English skills and educational levels, and does not account for gains from future migration. Despite this conservative modeling, the report finds that significant immediate and long-term benefits would accrue not only to affected workers, but to the state and nation overall.

You can download a copy of the report here: csii.usc.edu/economic_benefits.html »

Photo by 'hoo on page 8 of the document; page 10 of the PDF. :)

wither I wander

Our thoughts are shackled by the familiar. The brain is a neural tangle of near infinite possibility, which means that it spends a lot of time and energy choosing what not to notice. As a result, creativity is traded away for efficiency; we think in literal prose, not symbolist poetry.

A bit of distance, however, helps loosen the chains of cognition, making it easier to see something new in the old; the mundane is grasped from a slightly more abstract perspective. As T. S. Eliot wrote in the Four Quartets: "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

(...)

We travel because we need to, because distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But something in our mind has been changed, and that changes everything.

Tremendous good read from Jonah Lehrer on why travel is good for the brain.

Also appears in the latest McSweeney's Reader. Found via the AFAR blog.

voulez

Port Au Prince by night
Originally uploaded by
Swiatoslaw Wojtkowiak

What people need first

is faith.

Said the Pastor, his arms
around two
of his church members
injured in the quake

Oh, pastor,

said one.

We need everything.

Found in the NYT interactive news feature: Devastation and Survival Along Avenue Poupelard.

the slime mold that transgressed Tokyo

Researchers in the UK have discovered that, when tempted by oat flakes, "the slime mold Physarum polycephalum forms networks with comparable efficiency, fault tolerance, and cost to those of real-world infrastructure networks—in this case, the Tokyo rail system."

As reported in ScienceNOW.



I wonder how the slime mold would fare against Rahul, the public transportation savant of NYC.

deep into that darkness peering

Since 1949 ... a black-clad figure has shown up annually early on the morning of Jan. 19, the author’s birthday, to raise a Cognac toast to his grave and deposit three red roses, along with the remnants of the Cognac bottle.

But the visitor — whose identity, or identities, has never been revealed, despite some claims to the contrary over the years — failed to show up this year for the first time, ending a strange crepuscular tradition and disappointing a crowd of more than 30 people who forfeited a good night’s sleep to witness the visitation.

Randy Kennedy in the New York Times over the no-show of the Poe Toaster on the anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe's birthday, January 19th.

In today's paper there is speculation that the toaster "might have just had the flu or car trouble — or that he had died," as people have been known to do.



Update: Leslie Miller, she of much cake, commented on Facebook this morning that there was speculation that her friend, the poet David Frank, was the latest Poe Toaster. Mr. Frank passed away on January 14th. This recording of his poem, Alice Gains Plays the Harp, is really quite lovely.

I find myself in a strange place, on a curious errand

I find myself in a strange place, on a curious errand
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

But never fear: George is here.

Posting by cameraphone from
UIC.

freedom to connect

On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress. But the United States does. We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas. And we recognize that the world's information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a speech delivered at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. just yesterday. Transcript provided online by Foreign Policy.

An important read. Many thanks to @derekeb for passing this one along.

Clinton lays down several freedoms, consciously modeled after FDR's Four Freedoms speech. They include:

Freedom of Expression
Freedom of Worship
Freedom from Want
Freedom from Fear
Freedom to Connect

I'll have more to say about this in time (when I don't have to run off to my day job) -- chiefly because I'm unnerved by U.S. hegemony on the Internet and the muddling of public and private online spaces where personal expression takes place -- but for now I'm simply glad that the U.S. government is framing the Internet freedoms conversation in terms of human rights.

It's a good beginning.

No nation, group, or individual should stay buried in the rubble of oppression. We cannot stand by while people are separated from our human family by walls of censorship. And we cannot be silent about these issues simply because we cannot hear their cries. Let us recommit ourselves to this cause. Let us make these technologies a force for real progress the world over. And let us go forward together to champion these freedoms.

— Hillary Clinton

long tall drink of water

Resomation (a neologism meant to suggest rebirth) was first proposed for use in Europe as a method of disposing of cows infected by bovine spongiform encephalopathy. The corpse is placed in a pressurized chamber. The vessel is then filled with water and potassium hydroxide, creating a highly alkaline solution, and heated to 330 degrees. After about three hours, all that's left are a soft, white calcium phosphate from bone and teeth and a light brown primordial soup of amino acids and peptides. Bodies buried underground decompose in the same way, albeit over many years and aided by microorganisms.

(...)

The brown liquid, because it's sterile, can go down the drain. "There's no genetic material in it at all; it's just basic organic materials," Sullivan assures. "You might get some people who say they want the fluid as well, but at the end of the day, it's best to send it to the water treatment plant so it ends up back on the land, as nature intended it to."

Resomation in New York Times 9th Annual Year in Ideas, Dec 2009.

Like Soylent Green: only wetter.

mach it up

A solid object impacting on liquid creates a liquid jet due to the collapse of the impact cavity. Using visualization experiments with smoke particles and multiscale simulations we show that in addition a high-speed air-jet is pushed out of the cavity. Despite an impact velocity of only 1 m/s, this air-jet attains supersonic speeds.

The cavity pressure nonetheless is merely 1.02 atmospheres and thus much lower than the pressures required for supersonic flow through a rigid nozzle. The high air speeds are shown to result from the "nozzle" being a liquid cavity shrinking rapidly in time.

Stephan Gekle, Ivo Peters, Jose Manuel Gordillo, Devaraj van der Meer and Detlef Lohse in their paper: Supersonic Air Flow due to Solid-Liquid Impact via Slashdot.

Does that mean the deeply satisfying "bloop" that a stone makes as it hits the water is actually a sonic boom?

alchemy

I feel now that gastronomic perfection can be reached in these combinations: one person dining alone, usually upon a couch or a hillside; two people of no matter what sex or age, dining in a good restaurant; six people, of no matter what sex or age, dining in a good home.

—MFK Fisher

gordo v. wee

Researchers told consumers the regular and sale prices of a product, asked them to repeat the sale price to themselves, and then, a few minutes later, told them to estimate the size of the discount in percentage terms. Products with “small-sounding” sale prices (like $2.33) seemed like better deals than products with “big-sounding” sales prices (like $2.22).

In another experiment, the researchers used a pair of sale prices — $7.88, which sounds “big” in English, and $7.01, which sounds “small” — but are the other way around in Chinese. Chinese and English speakers had opposite perceptions of the products’ relative value.

The results of a study by Keith Coulter of Clark University and Robin Coulter of the University of Connecticut regarding a long known "symbolic connection between speech and size: back-of-the-mouth vowels like the 'o' in 'two' make people think of large sizes, whereas people associate front-of-the-mouth vowels like 'ee' with diminutiveness". Reported in today's New York Times.

full of wise saws and modern instances

When it comes to As You Like It I usually don’t. As a rule, Shakespeare’s comedies leave me cold. I like my Bard with a little Tybalt in it; a Cordelia and her mad daddy at odds and then reconciled; or a couple of star-crossed lovers dead in a heap on the cold stone floor, the whole neighborhood full of regret.

Sam Mendes’ direction of As You Like It at BAM’s Harvey Theater changed my mind -- not in a pure binary way, but in one of those subtle shifts of perception that dissolves intolerance and makes the world richer and more inclusive for it.

Shakespeare’s comedies are now something more subtle and rich and real than they were before.

The set design is richly cinematic, with a luminous quality that one might expect from the director of American Beauty, but most appreciable was the transformation of the story itself from the ways I’ve experienced it in previous productions (in less capable hands).

Mendes has uncovered something true about Shakespeare’s play that I never knew.

Gone is the madcap screwball tone and laughable gender confusions. Instead:

• The gravity that binds us to those we care for occupied the stage like an unnamed actor, swinging the players into their orbits as gravity influences planets around a single star in unique but concomitant obliques.



• Twinning was everywhere and beautifully explicated in ways far more psychologically revealing than Rosalind could convey by simply donning drag. Power and class are flip flopped; gender is bent. When we move from the court of the usurping Duke to the winter woods of his expulsed brother we see the treacherous Duke (whom we’ve come to know as erratic and violent -- fearful of maintaining his shaky status) step, with his retinue, to the hard wood wall that backs the stage.[1] In the dim light the wall rises to reveal the wild and the wood behind them, and they step out of their court finery into weather ravaged rags. Before our eyes they become the court in exile. Before our eyes we see the wheel of Fortune spin and end on her head.



• We see the play’s hallmark gender confusion played out not as buffoonery but as a part and parcel slice of humanity, where human sexuality is more subtle than a pure pipefitting of parts, and all players are ultimately more nuanced than they seem.

Where the production is weak:

• There’s a lovely strain of melancholy that moves through the play and influences its pacing. This works beautifully until the end, where it’s forced upon the reconciliation scene where parties are wed and the father and daughter are reunited. We need a little more madcap pacing here to make it play right; a few more exuberant reunion embraces, and we need them sooner than they were received.



• Somewhere in the mix, too, we lose sight of why Rosalind remains disguised in the forest. She’s encountered her father, we learn, and yet remains concealed. Why? It supports her charade with Orlando, of course, but the threat is no longer clear or imminent -- we need a sharp reminder of why she conceals her true self once she’s transitioned to the safety of the woods.

But these are small things, and the play as a whole is a lovely retreat and a mind opening three hours. Bonus to the whole is the delicate integration of orchestration. Musicians are placed both above the stage to set the tone and then emerge to make music within it. I’m of the school that believes a well-made play has a little bit of music and dancing in it -- As You Like It accomplishes both, and the choreography of the happily coupled pairs somehow managed make me cry, which I have to count as a success even though it startled me.

Thank you, Mr. Mendes, and Company. As it turns out, I liked it very much indeed.


As You Like It is a Bridge Project production, a collaboration between BAM, the Old Vic and Neal Street. It will run at BAM through March 13th.

Cast:
Ashlie Atkinson, Phoebe
Jenni Barber, Audrey
Michelle Beck, Celia
Edward Bennet, Oliver
Christian Camargo, Orlando
Stephen Dillane, Jaques
Alvin Epstein, Adam & Sir Oliver Martext
Jonathan Lincoln Fried, Le Beau
Richard Hansell, Amiens
Ron Cephas Jones, Charles the Wrestler
Aaron Krohn, Silvius
Anthony O’Donnell, Corin
Juliet Rylance, Rosalind
Thomas Sadoski, Touchstone
Michael Thomas, Dukes Frederick & Senior
Ross Waiton, William
Stephen Bentley-Klein and Shane Shanahan, Musicians

Originally uploaded by beebo wallace

[1] I mentioned to my brother -- my date for the evening -- that the wall in question reminded me of the wall in Mary Stuart, representing her imprisonment in the Tower. Come to find out it wasn’t happenstance -- Neal Street, Sam Mendes production company which is entangled in the Bridge Project, was also involved in bringing Mary Stuart to Broadway.

maskrosbarn

Dandelion
Originally uploaded by Photomish Dan

Maskrosbarn: "Dandelion child," a Swedish expression, meaning a child "with 'resilient' genes — [who] does pretty well almost anywhere, whether raised in the equivalent of a sidewalk crack or a well-tended garden.

Cited in The Science of Success in the Atlantic Online in December 2009; first heard on CBC's Radio One, The Brains of Babes.

Also mentioned in the Atlantic piece: "There are also 'orchid' children, who will wilt if ignored or maltreated but bloom spectacularly with greenhouse care."

swan song

swan song
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

T minus two & a half hours before I head home. Hoping to squeeze in a quick look at MoMA's Bauhaus show, a brief visit to Takashimaya and a hello/goodbye with the women who loaded me up with so much oxygen-rich laughter at K's fabulous b-day bash last night that I didn't notice it was morning already.

But first: a little coffee.

Posting by cameraphone from Midtown.

shortly after noon

shortly after noon
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Stopped for a picnic. Provisions were middling, but I didn't want to pass on the chance to sit in the park, in the sunshine, with all the old folks warming their bones.

So I sat.

Posting by cameraphone from Central Park, NYC.

yay. play.

yay. play.
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Quickest way to mark yourself as a tourist in New York? Request cream for your coffee in a city that drinks theirs with skim milk.

Although half the time they'll assume you meant cream as a euphemism and bring you milk anyway.

Posting by cameraphone from Sarahbeth's in the basement of the Whitney in Midtown Manhattan where I'm fortifying before heading upstairs to see my girl Georgia. (O'Keefe.)

If I'm lucky my brother might even put in an appearance.

I just sent Haiti a water buffalo

Water Buffalo
Originally uploaded by notashamed

You can too: give to Heifer International »

Or give a duck or a goat or a cow or a rabbit or a chick.

How Heifer International approaches disaster rehabilitation »

How they're helping in Haiti »

poppies

a found poem

Other wars have happened since.

Only when they passed 100
under gentle nudging
did they break their silence

The words tumbled out then

Mr. Allingham misstepped
into the vile hole
where he could feel
against his groping hands
the floating carcasses
of rats and parts
of human bodies

Mr. Patch in his nursing home
saw the linen cupboard light
flash on

and cried out

He thought it was the shell
that killed three of his mates
leaving nothing to find
and had sent into his abdomen
a jagged chunk of shrapnel

cut out
without anaesthetic
four men holding him down

Both men remembered the mud

sticky gluey mud
mud crusted with blood

in which men and horses drowned

In old age he visited the battlefield
now tided and grassed over
staring out from his wheelchair
he murmured

Mud. Mud. Mud.

Found in From Memory to History in the 17 December 2009 issue of the Economist, concerning the deaths of the last two surviving veterans of WWI.

just past security at ft. myers

just past security at ft. myers
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

No body scans as yet at TSA checkpoints at airports
in Chicago (O'Hare), Akron, Ohio, or Fort Myers, Florida.

Boarding for Charlotte first, then home.

Posting by cameraphone.

see ya, Florida.

see ya, Florida.
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Thanks for the gator.

Posting by cameraphone
from Fort, Myers.

dunes

dunes
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Chicago to Cleveland to Twinsburg to Akron to
Naples, Florida before the day is out.

Wish me luck & good weather.

Posting by cameraphone from the first leg.

kansei

Kansei is manifested in three ways. The first is the expression (hyojo) of an object, or its appearance. This includes color, texture, material, and surface treatments: all the qualities visible to the eye.

The second is the creator’s gesture or intent (dosa), or the body’s physical responses to the object. These become apparent upon using or touching the object—how it feels in the hand and how its fragility or strength dictates one’s movements.

Finally, there is the heart (kokoro)—the emotions an object stirs. This psychological dimension is the most abstract, but it’s also the most prized by Japanese designers, who speak of the feelings of recognition, attachment, or playfulness that an object elicits in its user, perhaps because it functions so well or is pleasant to look at.

From Metropolis + Japan, a special supplement to the December 2009 issue of Metropolis

Photo: Takayama Wood Works

in search of memory

Please come to a theater near me.

Please.

btw: Eric Kandel's book, In Search of Memory? Brilliant and a pleasure to read.

harmonic convergence

It's very sweet. When they're doing this singing thing, they're reaching their legs across to the other one, trying to do footsies.

Medical entomologist Gabriella Gibson of the University of Sussex and the Natural Resources Institute of the University of Greenwich commenting on her mosquito research in Science.

Gibson found that two variant mosquito types -- which are visually indistinguishable -- find others of their type through the music they make:

Gibson and colleagues collected larvae of the two forms in Burkina Faso and raised them in the lab. Then they stuck a short piece of wire to their backs with beeswax and brought them within a few centimeters of another bound mosquito of the opposite sex. The pair flapped in place while a microphone recorded their "music"; mosquitoes sing by speeding up or slowing down their wing beats, which changes the frequency of their high-pitched whines.

The mosquitoes harmonized--but only with mosquitoes of the same form. A pair of two M or two S mosquitoes aligned their wing beats so that the female beat her wings twice for every three beats of the male's wings. Like a bowed violin string, the beating wings also created higher frequencies, which match when males and females are harmonizing. "If they're of the same form, they'll stick with each other with this harmonizing just for seconds on end," says Gibson. "If they're the two opposite types, they really won't come together."

A mating pair of mosquitoes in harmony (audio) »
Not »

in the bleak midwinter

in the bleak midwinter
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Saturday. Ducking the cold and doing household
chores, mostly. You?

Posting by cameraphone from home.

what I'm not wearing today (and why)

what I'm not wearing today (and why)
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

It's my own fault, really.

Posting by cameraphone.

daddy walked in darkness

Photo: Me & my daddy on a family camping trip in Vermont. I was probably three.

The mother of my high school boyfriend was the first person to call me a nomad. J told me about it later, saying she remarked it was a wonder I was so normal, seeing how I lead such a nomadic life. I was a high school senior then, and I had attended twelve different schools, only a small fraction of which were in the same school district.

We were the renters on the block; the kids who were always a little unkempt. I learned in awkward and sometimes embarrassing ways that we were different from the kids who rooted long and hard in a single place and all knew each other from Kindergarten; learned in bright hot flashes that we were the transient ones.

But being the new kid in many lonely lunchrooms gained me the skill of knowing always how to be anywhere, easily. How to make friends; how to be the first to say hello. I suspect it’s also the root cause of my persistent solitude and my wandering. Never having a place to settle and be easy in your skin means it’s best to keep moving.

I know now that our curious habits were my father's doing. At the time I assumed no agency -- that was just how things were. Always. Predictably. Now that I’m grown I have a heart full of theories about why we were on the move so much, but this post isn’t about what was missing, or about what gnawed through the electrical lines in the dark; this post is about what made it all okay somehow.

I suspect the music had something to do with it; somehow managed to anchor it all, somehow produced in all four of us kids a solid center to start from and make our way in the world with some kind of certainty that what we were doing was all right.

The music was always there, and the music was always home. It was there when friends gathered late around the table, or when my dad let us come with him to the studio. It was there when he picked up his guitar, whether an emotional storm had just blown through the house and throats ached from the yelling, or we were just floating collectively on a the sweet tide of Sunday morning.

I still feel it every time my daddy picks up his guitar and plays. Felt it when he strummed just a few fragments over Christmas; felt it when he played for the first time after his coma, after he came back from the dead, when he was home at last and I handed him a rental six-string on the doctor’s prescription, who said it would help the neurons destroyed in the accident wire back up again.

There is something inarticulate in a tune, when it's shared and when it's authentic, that says: it’s okay to search this thing out, to figure out for your own self what it all means. When the music's playing there's an unspoken invitation to ride it, it’s yours; and there's an unspoken understanding that the ones playing with you will keep you company, ride right alongside, and find their own measure.

Where everything is all right.

A note about the clip: My dad recorded this a long time back when he was recording and promoting and producing for Jerden Records in Seattle. It's shown up on a couple of compilation CDs in recent years, but it's impossible to find a shareable clip online, so I patched together this brief video with Apple's iMovie program. I'm still a newbie at the app -- I prefer Adobe Premiere but my PC hard drive combusted and there's no getting at my installation -- so regrettably, until I can figure out how to override the time constraints, all I can offer you is a one minute clip of a three minute track. Of my daddy. Walking in darkness. (It's an old blues cover -- I'll see if I can hit him up for more info about the song's history and the recording itself.)

p.s. My grama, my father's mother, hated this song -- in a what-will-the-neighbors-think kind of way.

to the vector belongs the spoils

Video: The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics

Via aesthetic interlude »

until such a time

2009 has officially become known around the 'hoo household as the year of death and disappointment -- I'm not at all sorry to see it go.

Welcome to the party, 2010. Let's try something new.

MAXXImus

Illus: Zaha Hadid

Christ, can you imagine what Calder would do with this space?

Artist Brian Clarke commenting to New Yorker writer John Seabrook on Zaha Hadid's MAXXI gallery in Rome which opened recently as an exhibit itself -- there isn't any art hanging on the walls just yet.

Clarke was responding to the concern, raised by an Italian journalist, that the space might be too daunting.

New Yorker subscriber? Click here for the whole profile on the Pritzker Prize winning architect »

Photo: Zaha Hadid Architects