Lunar Camel Co. field guide to trees, ch. 4: other people’s trees

Years, Schmiede Hallein, Austria, 2011.

Bartholonäus Traubeck, Years. A turntable plays trees by analysing “their strength, thickness and rate of growth. This data serves as basis for a generative process that outputs piano music. It is mapped to a scale which is again defined by the overall appearance of the wood (ranging from dark to light and from strong texture to light texture).” Via Need Supply.

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Axel Erlandson’s tree circus in the Santa Cruz mountains, via Creatures of Comfort. Erlandson died in 1964 and the trees were then cared for by a tree-loving architect. In 1985 they were moved to a theme park in Gilroy, where they live today. Tree circus scholars can learn more from the Tree Circus Collection at Santa Cruz’s Museum of Art & History.

sycamore phone booth by Mark Primack

the tree circus comes to town by Mark Primack

Cf. Arborsmith Studios; Pooktre tree shapers; the German master of treedome shaping; unrelated German tree fence from the 1930s; Indian tree bridges; Plantware.

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Italian tree tea from Buon Italia.

Ingredients: coriander seeds, juniper berries, cloves, orange rinds, cinnamon bark, ginger rootstocks, mountain pine needles.

“Un sorso di salute, nel rispetto dell’ambiente” = “A sip of health, while respecting the environment.” I bought it more for making ice cream with than for drinking, but it’s nice for drinking. I was expecting it to taste strongly of pine trees the way Italian pine honey does — eating pine honey, in my experience, is like being bonked on the head with a pine branch — but actually it’s rather gentle and balanced, with no one flavor dominating. Just the thing for a hiker’s mug.

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In Suffolk there’s a beech so ugly that it terrifies children and pensioners, says the Daily Mail. I admit I did not read the article closely but it’s probably a benefits scrounger, too.

ugly tree by David Garnham

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Blog-friend a wild slim alien — who is in fact a tree — pointed me in the direction of Five Dials, a monthly literary mag from Hamish Hamilton. Number 22 (Why Willows Weep and Other Tales From The Forest Floor) consists of fables about nineteen varieties of trees native to the U.K. and may be read here. Five Dials is a PDF mag but you can buy a special dead tree copy of this one issue to support the Woodland Trust here. They’ll plant five trees if you do.

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how to get a tree to speak

EOS magazine’s talking tree has been telling the world about its life in Brussels for a year or so now. There doesn’t seem to be any sound coming through on its YouTube channel but you can listen to the tree on SoundCloud.

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Chapter 3 of my field guide to trees is here.

Jean Painlevé

Jean Painlevé photo from Wikipedia.

I’m going to stick with the oceanographic theme this blog has had lately because why not. Let’s watch some Jean Painlevé films. Do you know of him? He did a lot of things — he wrote, acted, translated, collaborated with surrealists, got involved in anarchist and communist stuff — but he is best known for his science and nature films, some of which he shot underwater using an aquatic camera like the one he’s holding above. There’s a very good essay by Jim Knox at Senses of Cinema here that captures what it is I like about his films:

Short works, almost exclusively documentaries devoted to natural history, his films were neither strictly intended as popular novelties nor as celluloid jargon for academic peers. This fragile balance of tone and method, so enchanting to an awestruck contemporary viewer, provides the clearest precedent for the work of an Anglophone documentarist like David Attenborough; Painlevé gives a fabulist’s account of the enchanted marginalia of animal life and behaviour.

Enchanted marginalia is exactly what I am perpetually on the lookout for. It doesn’t come off if the auteur holding up the frame around their chosen subject — the love life of octopuses, for example — has a cynical view of their audience, and unfortunately in my opinion most people who make films do. To maintain the fragile balance that Knox refers to requires something finer and stranger than empathy with one’s audience; it requires a sense that somewhere out there are people, some people at least, who will intuitively understand what is hilarious and touching about a crustacean waggling its antennae to plink-plonk music.

Here are excerpts from Amours de la pieuvre (Love life of the octopus) (1965), from The Criterion Collection’s DVD Science is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé.

If the video won’t play you can watch it here.

And here is an earlier one, Crabes et Crevettes, part I, 1929.

If you’d like to read more about Painlevé I recommend the Electric Sheep review of Science is Fiction here, and the Scott Macdonald essay here.