Posts tagged #Modern Mythology

Constellative Narration

One morning after a hazy night the words were there, sitting in the typewriter: Write the Stars.

Hokey sounding shit, to be sure, but the basic idea feels true enough. Mythologic constellations represent characters and stories. They are outlines, with stars as pivot points of development. "Writing the stars" is simply a reductive focus of narrative.

Seven stars to Orion, but it's not a literal concept. Just how far down can you distill the story of a giant hunter blinded by Oenopion, only to recover his sight and later be killed at the bow of Artemis?

That's not the point. How many of the words can you eliminate? Can we tell a lush story with sparse details? To do that, the story must resonate. It must be eternal, something that already existed in all of us.

Perhaps constellations don't tell stories so much as illuminate the ones we already know.

Idea: A Mass of energy comes into being. Its presence is immense, significance overwhelming and existence universally known. It is the essentialness of life. It belongs to everyone, and yet it comes into existence in a small forest, just beyond a farmer's field.

There are calls for study. The government intervenes, sets up barriers, tries to keep people back. The Mass expands - it grows, it glows, it reaches past fences towards everyone. It cannot be controlled as it exists in a state of universal dispersion.

How do you tell that story?

Posted on November 12, 2014 .

Obsession & The Bates Boxes

Obsessions are strange. One day you're going about your life, all of your Priorities and Wants in relative order. And then, BOOM. You own something ridiculous, your thoughts are re-ordered, you think about chess in the shower or Her when you make coffee. You consider flight school or running a marathon or becoming a farmer.

Our latest obsession is the Bates Box.

The Bates Boxes were manufactured in the mid 1920s, and are beautiful examples of craftsmanship and ingenuity. They're essentially an early, art deco rolodex, and a very cool system of internal gears help to smoothly move the list of phone numbers.

Bates Manufacturing made a lot of office equipment and was best known for its sequential numbering devices used on legal submissions. But these little boxes have grabbed my imagination. Stripping them down reveals beautiful steel underneath, and replacing 80-year old phone numbers with poetry is my way of making them new again.

Fun fact: Thomas Edison's company owned Bates Manufacturing for a while.

We're obsessed, and have downloaded the patents on variations and put in research requests on related companies. There's no reason for it, no purpose. Just ... curiosity and focus.  

Obsession.

Posted on October 10, 2014 .