I have been receiving bags of fanmail (mostly from Europe, where i'm huge) asking me, "why exactly were you just in Scotland a few weeks ago anyway?"
I was hired to go take photos of a golf course in development on the East Lothian coastline of Scotland, also known as "the cradle of golf". Now i can already hear you art nerd cynics out there going, "ewwwww golf??? how borrrring". And that's sad really, but understandable. Chalk golf up as yet another thing that americans have pirated, gutted, and frakensteined into some new monster cash cow with virtually no soul. The truth is, if you go back to the roots of the game, beneath all the bullshit that has been piled on top since, you will find one of the greatest games that Nature ever provided.
Nature? Yes, i said Nature. The Firth of Forth, a bay in the east of Scotland, is lined with sand dunes. Over time a grass became strong enough to tame those ever shifting dunes, locking them in a frozen undulation. Rabbits burrowed their homes there, feeding on the grass. When you walk the dunes still in Scotland, you see that the grass is mown with machine like precision to nearly half an inch high... Add all this to the primal human instinctual need to place things in holes (and pass time) and there you have it: Golf. Hitting rocks to rabbit holes with sticks over rabbit mown fairways on grass covered dunes.
Since, men have figured a way to tack on lots of bullshit to the game... making it elitist, exclusive, expensive and environmentally exhaustive. Sounds a bit like art, eh? And like art (and most things), underneath all of the constructs and destructs and dump trucks, something pure is still there. Something worth knowing and participating in.
Because golf is a practice, like yoga, spiritual and physical, that teaches one how to align mind and body all in conjunction with the natural world. All of the principles, all of the information for our Selves, is in golf.
Now there are some Americans trying to get back to the roots of the game. Golf course architect Tom Doak and his crew are an excellent example. They have crumpled up and recycled the American formula for CAD drawn golf courses. Tom spent much of his young life playing the courses of Scotland and studying all of the original mastery of courses hundreds of years old. He has surrounded himself with people that share the same love and have the same creativity and concern for the future of the game and the future of our planet, and together they make courses that are not only environmentally sound, but would make Andy Goldsworthy look like color by numbers.
In fact, walking Tom's course mid process, listening as he and his coworkers speak about all of their intents and purposes, seeing it all without a time worn social construct, i couldn't help but think that this was one of the greatest contemporary works i've seen in years.
So here are the photos. There are lots so browse as you like or not at all. My intent was to capture just the slimmest impressions of a work in the middle of its process. Just to get the hints of what is going to make this course, like all Tom's work, so amazing.
8.30.2006
The reason i was in the UK.
8.28.2006
The Price of Oil.
Well with a title like that, for sure it's gonna be a cheery post. But i gotta do it, just to help it get around, and so i can reference this later for Dickhead Republican Uncle (who is becoming quite the guest star on Nonprophet).
Seems the National Priorities Website (that i found thanks to CnL) has this way of calculating what the US could do with the money that has been used to pay for The Mess in Iraq. Like, instead of "war profiteering disguised as a Freedom March" we could have............. (prepare to weep)
- 16,733,296 People with Health Care or
- 627,551 Elementary School Teachers or
- 4,767,634 Head Start Places for Children or
- 25,168,314 Children with Health Care or
- 235,246 Affordable Housing Units or
- 4,390 New Elementary Schools or
- 7,685,109 Scholarships for University Students or
- 616,017 Music and Arts Teachers or
- 741,482 Public Safety Officers or
- 117,140,845 Homes with Renewable Electricity or
- 601,790 Port Container Inspectors
but wait...
that's only counting the money spent by California's taxpayers.
(40.3 Billion... aka 40,300,000,000 or Forty Thousand Three Hundred Millions)
But at least we found the weapons.
no
At least we caught Osama.
no
At least we have planted the seeds for a peaceful and democratic Middle East.
nope.
At least terror is on the decline.
no.
At least the Iraqi's are free of tyranny and have a working democratic government.
nada.
At least they have electricity again?
um..... what day is it?
Well at least we caught Saddam.
In Baghdad... right where we left him.
*At least we were able to pirate a shitload of oil out of the deal so i can continue to gorge myself on cheap gas.
no.
8.27.2006
My Grandfather was a modernist...
You scored as Cultural Creative.
Cultural Creatives are probably the newest group to enter this realm. You are a modern thinker who tends to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something greater than ourselves. You are very spiritual, even if you are not religious. Life has a meaning outside of the rational.
What is Your World View? created with QuizFarm.com |
8.23.2006
Are we snug yet?
Just getting settled in again. Wasn't feeling all back yet since the Edinburgh airport decided to hang on to some of my stuff for awhile. Ugh. I really don't want to get into a rant, but i will say this: it's all a freaking lie, and the security is a joke.
How do i know? Well... from the minute you set foot into the airport last week, all you hear is "no lotions liquids or gels". It almost became kind of funny to us after the 400th time we heard it. Anyway, after the first leg of our trip in Atlanta, after we have been searched three times, my friend pulls a bottle of hand lotion out of his bag. Oops. So then, as our bags are being thoroughly searched again right before getting on the plane, i stick a bottle of water into the front pocket of my pants. Obvious as you can get... they let me go right through. I did the same thing on the way back. No one ever asked me about it. They did however, to their credit, manage to nab my chapstick. (Operation Moistlips foiled!!!)
So there's your secure world, America. Funny thing is, it actually IS secure. (Your odds of dying from lightning being greater than by terrorist action... getting a hole in one about a hundred times greater). But these guys, who are trying to protect you from terror, prefer it that you live in terror. Why? Well... There's this reason. Would they really do that? Yes, they would.
Now, I must say that i'm a bit more annoyed by it all than scared. Inconvenienced rather than fearful. Maybe we should reduce it to a War on Bother? And i am truly vexed when i hear people in the airport smile to the guards while they are turning their head and coughing, saying "well, it's all for a good purpose." No it's not... IT'S BULLSHIT. And that particular thinking is why there are hundreds of Islamic (and other shades of brown) men getting tortured in Cuba right now. And it's why this administration is getting away with illegal wire taps. And it is why they are doing all of it. Because they can. Because we let them.
So, as this shit carries on until November, just like it did in 2002, and 2004.... purring slow and steady, like a heavy cat lying on your chest... code orange... code burnt orange.... code orange... code cha ching... remember: they like it this way. Watered down fascism is the new poison. Hitler had it wrong because he burnt white hot like magnesium and was done just as fast. This is the slow drip. A few arrests here, a bomb over there, a supposed plot over here, a number two guy over there... and on it goes... that leaky faucet that drips just as you were dozing off.
Just annoying enough to stay in power, Big Brother has indeed become the Big Bother.
-more shiny happy positive stuff when i get all my stuff back and settle a bit.
8.13.2006
Ay... Goot marnin froom Scoatlen
Well the jetlag has got me totally screwed up at this point. Its about 6 in the morning now and i finally decided enough staring at the ceiling and so here i am. Bleary eyed and blogging. Really worth the price of sleep to see this out the window of the flat i am staying in. That is Bass Rock. You can't see the color here but that is a huge white rock off the coast of North Berwick, on the East Lothian Coast of Scotland, in the Firth of Forth. It is covered, and i mean covered, with birds. Hence the whiteness... At one point in its career as a big rock, it hosted a prison that hosted prisoners that i gaurantee you were, towards the end of their life, deathly scared of anything that flies. 
Just over to the left of Bass Rock is Fidra Island. Also now a preserve for birds, Fidra comes from the Scottish word "feathery". Feathery is also the word for the first golf balls, which were to peices of leather sewn together and stuffed with a top hat full of feathers. Took two days to make. i have held one, they are like rocks. Because golf as we know it was born on that coastline you see just next to the island, i have been playing with a theory in my theorymaker that the ballmakers would take a small boat over to the island covered with birds(which i did once, also influencing my theory, and making me deathly scared of seaguls... whole other story) to get their feathers... thus the name "feathery". I think it's a swell theory...
Somewhere during all that, Fidra was the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. He stood on that beach as a child and making up an entire mythology, one day becoming old enough to take the very small journey over to its rocky shore. Like the story, a boy moving into the world of men.
Fidra was also home to a monastery at one point, long long ago... which is where the old saying came from, "some rocks hold monks, some hold prisoners, seaguls shit on both." You can look it up.
Now global warming is even having a drastic effect on the life inhabiting this small island. The ground is becoming to warm and firm for a certain plant to grow, which the birds used to feed on... and so it goes.
(PS. I'd just like to say that i didn't Google any of that. Just chalk it up as years of research about a friggin rock)
