The iPad Made Me Do It

Serra San Bruno, Calabria, January 11, 2011

Every now and then you get surprised by things that have a bigger impact on you than you expected.

For years I had the simplest cell phones, the less to worry about if I lost them or they broke. Then I got an iPhone and was jolted into another state. I could do a lot of the things I’d previously only been able to do with a desktop or laptop computer on a device small enough to fit in my shirt pocket.

I heard about the iPad, of course. My son-in-law, who is on top of all of this stuff, ordered one before they were even released. Friends and clients started showing up at meetings with them. Photographers started using them as a platform for showing work. That intrigued me.

My friend Walt Taylor even got one and raved about it. But Walt does that about a lot of things, like the time all he could talk about was the cleansing value of blanched okra. That was a fad I was happy to see pass quickly, if you’ll pardon the pun.

I thought about getting an iPad, but just couldn’t seem to justify it. I was waiting for evidence that the iPad could be a substitute for a traveling laptop.

All was resolved when my wife gave me an iPad for Christmas. I didn’t want to seem too geeky that day. But you can be sure that as soon as the crowds cleared and the dust was swept under the carpet I was playing with it.

It’s a marvelous thing to play with, if that’s what you want to do. I had to prove some utility though, and I’m happy to say that since Christmas I’ve demonstrated to myself that it can be a viable tool.

A quick audit:

The iPad does most everything that an iPhone does except that it’s neither a phone nor a camera. But I don’t think its dimensions lend themselves to being either. (Famous last words.)

The image quality on the screen is spectacular, every bit as good as you may have heard. It’s crisp, rich and bright. Still imagery and video look terrific on it. Even the speakers are decent.

The keyboard’s surprisingly good, though I’m not sure whoever designed it realized how much some of us use apostrophes and how much of a pain it is to flip between keyboards to access one. (It is a little disconcerting to not have a mouse, especially when you’re typing more than a few lines. My stubby fingers keep bumping the screen and moving the cursor to places I don’t want it to be.

Apples’ Pages application is no Microsoft Word. But it reads Word files, allows you to edit in its own proprietary format and exports files back to you in Word format.

With an application called PrintCentral I can print anything from the iPad to any of any networked printer. The newest version of the iPad operating system enables printing directly to certain kinds of wireless printers. But you probably have to have bought your printer in the last two weeks for it to be compatible.

The Safari browser is as fast my whatever network you’re using. (I don’t have the 3G version of iPad.) I can listen to iTunes radio or any of hundreds of radio stations on TuneIn Radio.

The killer apps, so far:

FlipBoard. If you grew up on magazines, FlipBoard is an aggregator of social media, print media and broadcasters with a visual interface that’s very magazine-like. Very nice.

My second guilty pleasure is iSpy. iSpy’s an aggregator of live cams, the perfect thing for those of us with insatiable appetites for live visual imagery of the world around us. At one glance, I can watch:

• Surfers at Waikiki.
• Researchers working in the snow along the Wales Strait in Canada’s Northwest Territory.
• People shopping at an outdoor market in Kiev.
• Cruise ships going in and out of the port of Hobart, Tasmania.
• Kids ice skating in Tofte, Norway.
• Tourists in Times Square.
• Waves crashing against the quay in Banff, Scotland
• Edinburgh Castle.
• Sunbathers on the beaches near Melbourne, Australia.
• A bird’s eye view of Istanbul.
• The harbor entrance at Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts.
• The surf at the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
• Traffic in Dubai.
• Ship traffic in the Hiroshima harbor.
• Street scenes in villages across the United Kingdom, Europe and Asia.

These are just a few of the choices. You can even control the view of some of the cameras remotely from your iPad. Is that cool, or what? I captured the picture above of the Calabrian village of Serra San Bruno (Southern Italy) this morning just before the sun rose there.

They really should have called this thing the “Window.”

Oma, on the Sea of Japan, January 11, 2011

The House that [Name Here] Built

The House that Nat Built, 2010

I was going to call this “The House that Frank Built” because it’s where Frank Sinatra made some of his most famous recordings.

Then I realized I had to call it “The House that Johnny Built” after I learned that Capitol Records had been co-founded by Johnny Mercer. That’s okay. I mean, if anyone in American musical history deserves to have a building attributed to him, you could do a lot worse than think of Johnny Mercer.

It turns out I was wrong altogether. This former headquarters of Capitol Records was known at the time it was built as “The House that Nat Built” in recognition of all the money Nat King Cole made for the company.

It’s an interesting building, certainly one of the most iconic in Hollywood. It’s said to be the world’s first circular office building. Design-wise, it was a modern, earthquake-proof gesture in a landscape of crumbly Deco buildings.

Long before the current “green” building movement, architect Welton Beckett was just being practical when he designed the energy efficient awnings that give the building its distinctive look. People who didn’t know that have always thought the awnings were intended to make the building look like a stack of 45-rpm records.

Like a pyramid, the real business of the Capitol Records Tower is out of sight. Its recording studios, designed by guitarist Les Paul, are still regarded as some of the best in the world. The outside walls of the ground floor studios are ten inch thick concrete. Set in almost a foot from the concrete exterior, the individual studios rest on cushions of rubber and cork.

Thirty feet below ground level are a famous series of trapezoidal-shaped echo chamber studios, some big enough to hold a full symphony orchestra. It’s said the design of these subterranean studios creates an echo effect that lasts up to five seconds.

There’s also some whimsy about the place. Except for a brief period in 1992, when it was changed to say “Hollywood 50” in honor of the label’s fiftieth anniversary, the red beacon on top of the building has spelled out the word “Hollywood” in Morse code since the building was opened in 1956.

Talk about technology span! Here was a state-of-the-art 1950s building purposely topped off with a beacon programmed to flash a language already more than a hundred years old. Samuel Morse’s granddaughter was even on hand to flip the switch at the building’s opening. To me, that makes about as much sense as having one of the Wright Brothers’ descendants flip the switch on the first computers at Twitter.

[What to see a Capitol Records studio in action? Ken Fields brought this to my attention.]

The View No More

The Side View, 2009

The view shown is from the left side of our house looking into the back yard. I built the copper trellis that frames this view about ten years ago. The Carolina jasmine we grew up and across it took years to mature. In recent years, though, it had completely covered the copper arches and formed a thick and beautiful canopy.

This is the side of the yard that was for many years shrouded in shade almost year round. Grass wouldn’t survive there. Even moss had a hard time getting a foothold in that ground. The side of the house required regular cleaning to keep it from becoming completely covered in green shade loving algae.

The removal of two giant dying oaks whose rotten limbs were falling closer and closer to the house opened up that whole area to more sun. The airflow was improved immediately, so the exterior of the house doesn’t require as much cleaning. I reconditioned the soil in the flower beds, cleaned out the weeds, moved some plants there from other parts of the yard and brought in some new plantings to brighten up the area. I installed an old driftwood sculpture that had languished in another part of the yard, giving this new garden area a focal point.

We were rewarded with the view above.

Sadly, the weight of last week’s snow was more than the copper trellis could bear. Sometime early in the week when we weren’t looking the weight of the snow on the jasmine vines bent the curved arches of the trellis and the whole contraption fell to the ground.

My wife was heartbroken that the jasmine she’s been training to grow across the trellis no longer has a host. I was disappointed that the copper arches on top of the trellis, the parts that I’d spent so long making and getting right, were ruined. (Bending copper tubing for decorative use is tough even with the right tools. Making two copies of the same arc is nothing short of miraculous when you have my limited pipe bending skills.)

Several times over the last few days I have attempted to right the trellis. The straight horizontal and vertical pieces can be rejoined without much trouble. But without the curved top, a once elegant view now looks as if you’re viewing through a cereal box.

I’m done with copper. It’s going to take a little doing to extricate the copper pieces from the jasmine. But after I get the messed clean up, one of my spring projects will be to replace the trellis with a sturdier wooden version. I’m partial to Walpole Woodworkers designs. They’re very good, but also very dear in cost. So I guess I’ll be making a trip to Lowe’s, putting a new blade on the radial arm saw and seeing if I can’t create my own knock-off.

Men in Black

Space for Lease, 2008

Thinking about our old house on the house on the dune the other day triggered another memory I’d stashed far away.

As I mentioned before, the house was a duplex. My mother had built it with the expectation that we would live in one side and the income from the rental unit would pay the mortgage and provide her with a little supplemental income in her old age.

It didn’t exactly work out that way. The rental unit did well. My mother sold the place not long after I went off to college, though, and the proceeds cushioned her for many years thereafter.

We didn’t have many problems with tenants. In the fall of 1966, though, the rental unit was taken for the winter by a young couple named Umphlett. The husband had just gotten out of the Army and was working as a handyman at an old beach hotel nearby. The wife still had a year or two left on her military service.

Things went well for several months. Then the rent started being paid a little later and later each month. The husband disappeared. Mrs. Umphlett explained that her husband was away visiting family. Friends of the couple and moved in with their mongrel dog, ostensibly to help with the rent.

Eventually, the rent stopped being paid at all. We didn’t see either of the Umphletts. The friends disappeared.

My mother tried to track the couple down. The owner of the hotel where the husband worked told her Umphlett had been fired some weeks before. We learned that we might have some recourse by contacting the adjutant general at the base where the wife was stationed. But before that happened, the following took place.

It was a Friday night. I was downstairs watching The Twilight Zone. I went to the kitchen to get a snack. Movement outside the window caught my eye. When I looked closer I realized the house was surrounded by men in black suits and trench coats. They also had guns in their hands.

There was a knock at the front door, actually more of a pound. I opened the door and found a federal agent holding a badge up to the storm door. He demanded to know who I was and where the Umphletts were. I was scared, but assured him that he was knocking on the wrong door.

A brief discussion followed, during which we learned that 1) the Umphletts weren’t really named Umphlett, 2) they weren’t married and 3) both were deserters from the U.S. Army.

We provided a key to the rental unit and found that the couple had left without taking any of their possessions, and further left the dog alone and untended. The agents inspected the place, took the dog and left.

It seems ours wasn’t the first wrong door they’d knocked on. They’d started their raid by pounding on the door of an alcoholic divorcée who lived in the next house up the street from us. Long into her cups by that time of night, Mrs. H. was upstairs in her den dozing in front of the television. She didn’t hear the pounding on her door initially, but finally went to a front window to see what was making the noise. “Federal Agents, Mam! Open up!” they yelled at her. Not at all impressed, she responded, “And I’m the f---ing Queen of England!” and slammed the window shut.

The adjutant general at the local base informed us that in addition to being unable to compel the deserting couple to make good on the rent, the law required us to hold onto their possessions for a year.

It fell to me to clean the apartment out. This all happened during the Vietnam War. The personal belongings I moved from the apartment to a locked shed out in the back yard included firearms and photographs that were disturbing in their crudity and atrociousness. More than forty years later my mind has not yet erased the memory of some of those images. Let’s just say that when photographs of the My Lai massacre were made public the following year I had seen enough in Mr. Umphlett’s photo collection to not be surprised by them.

We never did hear what happened to the Umphletts. Rumor had it that both were eventually apprehended and thrown in the brig. We also heard that the man had been released after ten or eleven months. We don’t know anything for sure. But I do remember that shortly before the year was up, someone broke into the shed behind our house and stole a bunch of those incriminating photographs.

At the Salk

Salk Institute (the classic view), 2010

If you read about a place and fantasize long enough about visiting it, there’s a good change it won’t live up to the mythic proportions you’ve envisioned.

Such was my experience with architect Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. Named for Jonas Salk—the scientist whose vaccine saved a lot of us from getting polio—and built by the March of Dimes, the Salk Institute is one of the nation’s leading scientific research centers in the fields of molecular biology, genetics, neurosciences and plant biology.

The Salk Institute is also a landmark of modern American architecture. Louis Kahn hit his professional stride late in his career, abandoning the popular International style of the time for designs that were described as “monumental” and “monolithic.” As one reviewer also put it, “They hide little about themselves.”

That’s a good description of the Salk Institute. When it was finished in 1965, its brutal simplicity was more appealing as a sculptural monument than as a strictly practical form-following-function structure.

Brutal might not be a kind word when referred to a building. Kahn’s Salk campus, however, inspires the term, what with all its straight lines, hard edges and sharp corners.

The Institute has a marvelous site just up from the cliffs of Torrey Pines. From its terrace one’s eye is drawn not to the short range of hills in the foreground, but to the vast horizon of the Pacific Ocean just beyond. It’s a majestic elevated platform that brings to mind the way the Trocadero in Paris overlooks the Eiffel Tower.

You enter the campus from the east. The buildings in the original complex are constructed of poured concrete that was purposely left unfinished. There are two large parallel six-story wings of research laboratories flanking a broad plaza paved with travertine marble and interrupted only by a narrow water run than flows from the eastern end of the plaza to pools at the western end. I’m sure people have wanted to add furniture, potted plants, maybe even umbrellas and color to the courtyard. Kahn, however, decreed that the space should be kept free of distraction to encourage greater thought. And so it has remained, an elegantly open and empty piano nobile with the open air and the wide Pacific to set your mind free.

Salk Institute (the north range), 2010

In front of each of the wings are stairway towers that contain offices, studio spaces and utilities. The buildings are punctuated by teak trim that, also by Kahn’s instructions, has never been sealed or stained. (Teak is a handsome and durable material for a coastal site. But if you ask me the teak in the Salk Institute could use a little sprucing up.)

Salk Institute - 75, 2010

I asked a few people who work at the Institute what it’s like to work in such a landmark. I wondered if the lab spaces are as inspiring as the exterior. Opinions ranged from those who are so focused on their work that they barely notice the setting to those who consider it such an honor to be at the Institute that they would never think of speaking poorly of it in public.

I hope these photographs will give you some idea of what the Salk Institute is like. Unfortunately, they also make clear how little I know about architectural photography. Please excuse the misleading perspectives. The buildings at the Salk Institute do indeed stand upright and level.

Salk Institute - 52, 2010

Salk Institute - 40, 2010

The Tomato Harvest

The Harvest, 1993

The yard at our last home was a veritable Garden of Eden. Prior to its development into a subdivision, our neighborhood had been a strawberry farm. Back then you could have seen from the site of our house all the way down to Broad Bay.

The soil on that old farm had been well tended. Even thirty years later it was rich and moist. It was a great yard for a gardener, sunny yet protected from the harsh northeast winds of winter by high hedges.

Before we moved to that house, I’d never had a vegetable garden any more ambitious than a few cocktail tomatoes grown on a patio. But this yard came with a 100’ x 30’ vegetable garden. The previous owners of the house had worked the garden with a neighbor, who provided a tiller and a lot of vegetable gardening know-how.

We loved that garden. It fed our two families and a lot of friends and neighbors. From that garden I learned the lesson of patience and also that there are few things as fulfilling as pulling mature beets out of the ground.

There are many memories from that garden. But the one I cherish most was the September night in 1995 when, in anticipation of the first frost, my neighbor Roy and I decided to collect the last crop of tomatoes and make tomato sauce.

Mind you, we didn’t decide to start this project until after dark. The wives and kids had gone to bed already. Roy and I grabbed flashlights and hung a few strings of Christmas tree lights to illuminate the garden for this last tomato harvest of the season. Rabbits and turtles went scurrying in all directions when they saw us lumbering down the rows with our buckets. There were almost three dozen plants to empty.

The amazing thing about this enterprise, in case you wondered, is that no alcohol was involved. The frenzy was fueled purely by the prospect of fresh homemade tomato sauce. A good garden can do that to you.

Through the night we went back and forth between the garden and the kitchen, loading and unloading pots of tomatoes. We took turns in the kitchen, scalding the tomatoes in pots of boiling water and then dropping them into a sink of ice water to loosen the skins. It was well after midnight before we were ready to begin the actual sauce. Sometime after 3:00 a.m. we threw in the last tomato, loaded the pot with spices, and went home to bed.

As any of you who make tomato sauce will know, it takes a lot of tomatoes to make a good sauce. You start out with what seems like mountains of them. But after you’ve simmered that mountain for a day or so, you end up with just a pot or two of sauce. I don’t remember exactly how much we ended up with from that night’s harvest. What I do remember was the feast we had with our two families and some other friends a few nights later. The sauce was superb. The big long kitchen table was full of food, drink and noisy people.

Abundenza!

Secret Sam

The Window View, 2008

We called him Secret Sam. That wasn’t his real name, of course. But at the time that’s all we could come up with.

When I was in my teens we lived in a brick house built on top of a low sand dune about a block from the ocean. It was a sturdy two-story duplex, but it looked out of place at first, sitting as it did on top of the dune surrounded by nothing but sand. The house overlooked an even bigger sandy block that had once been the valley between several dunes, but was now flattened into a city block-sized sand lot.

There were just a few houses on the street when our house was built. From my bedroom I could look down the street to Atlantic Avenue and across to the ocean. The closest neighbor was two lots away.

One morning during a Christmas break from school, I happened to notice a car, a late model Chrysler, driving slowly up and down our. The street was paved with crushed stone and tar in those days, but was more often than not covered with sand during the winter. There weren’t enough people on the street for there to be much traffic. I noticed the car that morning because of the way the it moved slowly up the street, stopping briefly in front of each of the houses along the way.

For over a week I noticed this car visiting our street at different times of the day. Each time the driver would slow down and look at each house. The next week the car appeared one morning and pulled into the driveway in front of the house closest to us. The driver got out of the car. He was dressed in a suit and wore the kind of fedora that people of my father’s generation wore whenever they went out of the house. Later in the day I noticed that all of the windows of the house he’d entered had been covered from the inside with tin foil. Still later in the afternoon an ambulance pulled up out front and two burly attendants carried a stretcher occupied by someone small wrapped up against the cold like a mummy into the house.

By dinner time the phone line was buzzing with neighbors calling each other to see what was going on with the tin foil-covered windows. It was easy to conclude that the man had something to hide. Hence, the nickname “Secret Sam.”

There was so little activity in the house over the next several days—only the man continuing to drive his car up and down the street before parking in front of the house—that I finally called the police. That night, the Chrysler pulled up in front of our house and the suited man came up and knocked on our door. We were cautious as one might be with a stranger. But it turned out that the man just wanted to introduce himself and explain what was going on.

It seems we hadn’t been far off in our reckoning. The man’s real name was Marvin Farmer. He was a federal agent, in fact the head of the local Secret Service office. That conjured up all kinds of cloak and dagger possibilities in my mind. But Mr. Farmer explained that most of his work involved counterfeiting, handwriting analysis, cigarette running and drug case property seizures.

And the tin foil? Mr. Farmer frequently worked at night, he explained. The tin foil was to block the light when he needed to sleep during the day.

And the person bundled in from the ambulance? That turned out to be Mrs. Farmer, who was convalescing from lung surgery.

Until houses were built between us, the Farmers were our next-door neighbors for a few years. They were a peculiar couple. I never saw Mr. Farmer in anything but a three-piece suit. Mrs. Farmer was a frail woman, not unfriendly, but rarely seen out in the sunlight. They had no children. I never saw her leave the house and no one ever visited them.

I’m reminded of all of this because the newspaper reported the other day that Lawrence M. Farmer died at age 88 in a local hospital the day after Christmas. The notice mentioned that during his career he’d protected six American presidents, twenty-eight foreign heads of state and been known as one of the world’s most respected handwriting analysts.

He was known professionally by his first name, Lawrence. But we’ll always know him as Secret Sam.