If Henry David Thoreau had married Elizabeth Taylor, they'd be a couple a lot like my parents. My father likes to wander about in the woods spotting Pileated Woodpeckers; my mother likes to wander up and down Madison Avenue spotting handbags and candelabra. I've spent about as much time rock climbing as I have shopping for shoes in Nolita; I live in Vancouver, a city at the edge of the Wilderness; and growing up, the ideal Saturday was one in which my mother visited the antique shops in New England looking for coin silver spoons and mahogany sideboards, and my father and I discovered pretty blue pebbles in a quarry on a dirt road down the hill from the shop.

Being brought up by such a pair has something to do with how ambivalent I am about Andy Goldsworthy and his art. I bought Hand to Earth, Goldsworthy's latest book, as a present for Stewart this Christmas. I'd taken him to see Rivers and Tides earlier in the year, knowing he'd love it, and he did. He's not suspicious of nature or suspicious by nature, having been brought up by macrobiotic hippies who made candles, and not even having any shoes until he was five.

Photographs of capital-N Nature I find slightly cloying. You're unlikely to find an Ansel Adams print on my wall. I much prefer photographs of interruptions of nature, such as the photographs by Ed Burtynsky, or Nature as Theatre as done by Hiroshi Sugimoto, or photographs of the edge of nature by Gregory Crewdson situated in a suburbia in which the human, cultivated world is constantly threatened by nature's incursions. I'm moving in the general direction of a saying something here, but not arriving, and it's too late at night to do much about it, ...pillows, pillows, pillows.

LINK | 1:54 AM | TB

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