mourningdove

Self Care

I thought I’d continue the last post on daily choreography with a post on self care. It just seems like a good time to talk about it. Maybe it’s the change of seasons…. My friend Amy and I were joking that it’s been cloudy/gloomy here for the last week, and that’s apparently all it takesContinue reading “Self Care”

Daily Choreography

I’m not a routine person. I wish I were: I fully admit that routines are the secret to success in life. But something in my personality actively militates against doing the same thing over and over again, no matter how healthy it is. This has created several problems in my life: e.g., flossing (I flossContinue reading “Daily Choreography”

Cherry Pit Bitters

I’m not sure what my attraction is to food that could kill me. I think it’s just that I like strong and unusual flavors, and these tend to come along with concentrated chemicals of other kinds. I’m pretty sure it all started with Amaretti di Saronno, the wonderful little crunchy Italian cookies. They taste soContinue reading “Cherry Pit Bitters”

Ceramics Saturdays: Jizhou Ware

Though we’re through the Five Great Kilns now, there are still some really spectacular Song ceramics you should know about. We’ll start with my favorite kiln: Jizhou. Fired in Jiangxi during the Southern Song (1127-1279), these wares weren’t intensely prized at the time: their body was a relatively drab and coarse gray-brown, and their glazeContinue reading “Ceramics Saturdays: Jizhou Ware”

Friday Favorites: Berlin Restaurants

I ate some great food on this trip, some of which I’ve already mentioned, but I thought I would pull it together here for future reference: House of Small Wonder: Japanese and French plates, usually in a jewel-box location in the Hackescher Markt but temporarily relocated to the courtyard of the beautiful former Jewish Girls’Continue reading “Friday Favorites: Berlin Restaurants”

KMRU

Birgit and I went to the Roter Salon at the Volksbühne last night to hear Joseph Kamaru perform his electronic mixes of ambient and instrumental sounds. It was in many ways an extension of our Forest Listening experiment. It was an intense, continuous listening experience for about an hour, and both Birgit and I feltContinue reading “KMRU”

Sunny Morning in the Tiergarten

The old hunting grounds of the princes of Brandenburg. This is by the tea house in the English Garden.

Forest Listening

My colleague Birgit and I are working on a book about the promise (and problems) of monitoring forests from space. So, we’re spending a lot of time thinking about forests, reading stories about them, looking at maps of them, viewing art about them, and…listening to them? Birgit recently did a project with her students andContinue reading “Forest Listening”

Franziskanerkloster Ruine

Right across from my hotel in Alexanderplatz sat the oldest building in Berlin: the remains of a Franciscan monastery from the 13th century that was the first outpost/settlement of the town by the Margrave of Brandenburg. There was a roughly simultaneous settlement on the nearby island in the Spree River that is now Museum Island,Continue reading “Franziskanerkloster Ruine”

Ceramics Saturdays: Ru Ware

Ru ware is the rarest of the products of the Five Great Kilns of the Song Dynasty: only about 90 examples are still extant, and on the even rarer occasions they come up for auction, they fetch millions of dollars apiece. They were thrown only at a single kiln site in Henan for a periodContinue reading “Ceramics Saturdays: Ru Ware”