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Black Panther Bake Sale Pie
A while back the the dreadful heat of summer, Lawrence was reminiscing about a pie he recalled from his student days. “The Black Panthers use to sell it at their bake sales. Made with beans and spices. We ate it up.” I promised him I’d make one when the weather cooled down. And so over…
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Platitudes for Failure
My latest art project is a snarky perspective on trite phrases. What can you say to someone when they fail, fuck up, or falter? Why not use some platitudes that sound positive and supportive on the surface, but have a multitude of other meanings between the lines. “C’est la vie.”You failed and don’t want to…
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Kitchen stairs
The Monaca Doken guys surprised me twice on Tuesday. Once by moving a boulder to form The Giant’s Teeth, and again when they built me a staircase of foundation stones. The stairs sit at the northwest corner of the house, which will be the kitchen. They reach from the end of the retaining wall up…
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Shuttle driver
This week is the F1 Grand Prix in Japan and Fujii-san is a fixer for the Renault team. One of his extracurricular responsibilities was to host the related journalists for a day of interviews and meeting some of Japan’s Alpine owners. So he organised a daytime event at Monaca with lunch at Hangar eight yesterday,…
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Witch’s broom
Amongst the many branches I ran through the chipper last month, I found one that I set aside. It was the perfect shape my my hand and a good length to become a handle for something. After the jichinsai, the bamboo altar was dismantled and tossed on the burn pile. Before burning, I took a…
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The giant’s teeth
While we have freedom to drive the yumbo every which way across the lot, Monaca Doken are collecting all the old foundation stones and the boulders around the property to reuse them. It’s exactly what I hoped for – the quantity of materials around the space is epic and there are many stones just waiting…
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1:1 scale
Sasaki-san and Yoshida-san came to 555 today to stake out the corners of the building and to show me some really meaningful measurements. It took a few tries to get the building in the right place. I have reasons for not wanting it the typical 90 cm from the edge of the drainage – the…
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Retained
The gabion work finished up today when we threaded the lids on the top level this morning. It’s a magnitude more challenging to get the lids on with the rocks in than it is to put the empty cages together. There was a lot of squeezing with pliers and hands to get the edges close…
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Arranging stones
Creating gabion is a much more labor intensive process than I expected. You can’t just dump a bunch of rocks into the cage. Even at the bottom and back, every rock is positioned by hand into a pile that won’t shift. There are thousands of small decisions that add up to a filled frame. Sakaguchi-san…
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Water Test
The Kawasakis warned me not to drink the yamamizu, mountain water, that we have on tap at 555. It comes from the mountain to the east, piped in somehow that no one can actually explain to me, but that I will be responsible for eventually. There are networks of pipes all over these mountains, maintained…
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