I made some mercury last Sunday (La domenica, creato un po 'di mercurio)

For a moment, consider mercury, a silver metallic poisonous metal but also the mythical messenger of the Roman gods and diety of trade. It's from this name we have 'merchandise'. Mixed with sulphur, it becomes the red pigment that adorns the walls of ancient Pompeii. Here is a Mercury that I sketched out in clay this Sunday while it was raining.

The circle diameter of 4.125" is precisely that of my drains on the deck outside, so I'm just a few steps away from new bronze at the foundry. You might be asking yourself, 'why are there no drain holes if it's supposed to be a drain'? Those will be drilled when I make a wax master from the plaster mold.

Besides the function of making hatters crazy when smoothing felt or switching electricity on or off depending on an angle, mercury was also used in the past to separate gold flakes from other soil and dust. When thinking of nature in its most pristine forms, I still remember the time my dad took me 'gold panning' in the headwaters of a clear perfect Colorado stream. It took a while to get there driving up the side of a large mountain on a winding road.

As a wide-eyed seven year old, I was blissfully unaware of pollution or things like 'the environment'. Dad jumped out of the truck with a large silver pan with concentric lines around the inside. 'Come on boy, we're fixin to find some gold!', he proclaimed. Rushing excitedly down to the side of the stream, I saw some rainbow trout swimming in the center of the quick moving icy cold water.

Dad was taking out a chamois cloth and a large bottle of heavy silver mercury. He pointed down into the clear water at some gold flecks glistening back through the clear water even though it was mostly cloudy way up there in the mountains. 'See those, that's real money right there!' Well that's all I needed to hear, so I was down there at the waters edge standing on some rocks.

He put the pan down into the water and drew up some soil, swirling it around. Next, he poured some of the silver mercury into the pan to join up the gold flakes, and poured off the excess water back into the stream. Separating out the sand and dirt from the mercury, he then carefully poured the silvery remaining mercury into the chamois cloth. Squeezing it and twisting, he was able to get a ball of material down at the bottom of the cloth. Well it wasn't much so the chamois cloth slipped open and the mercury spilled in the stream. I'm pretty sure this was the reason that sad american indian was crying in all those commercials.

Stone Cold Carrara (Pietre di Carrara)

When in Italy back in October I took a train from Firenza (Florence to you English-city name-in-foreign-country insistent types) to Carrara (also called Carrara in English). This little coastal town is basically one of the best sources of marble and stone processing in the entire world. Michealangelo (Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti, no one ever knows his full name) walked these very mountains and quarries looking for likely pieces to carve famous sculptures in. Isn't it weird how the name Buonarroti kind of means 'good breaking' in Italian, and he was a sculptor? Whoa...

Here is one of the largest processors in town, Marmi di Carrara. Check out the comically large cranes for hoisting the blocks. They have gigantic saws too. I wonder if they ever sawed a car apart? You could make a stretch limo pretty easily there I think.

As a digression, here is an American sculptor I admire who picked out a *huge* piece of marble himself from a quarry in Colorado, then proceeded to carve a grand piano and a lady on it!!!

Back to Italy, Carrara has some of the best state of the art marble processing facilities and is one of the largest processors of marble blocks. Blocks are the form that they get the marble down from the cliffside in. They drill holes in the mountain, blast, and run like hell to avoid hundreds of tons of falling stone.
Here are some blocks that evidently landed perfectly on the back of a transport truck.

The city itself is small, but nice and friendly. Everywhere, the patios use expensive scraps of white marble tile. I felt like Augustus Gloop when he saw the chocolate river since beautiful stone was everywhere. I walked *all* over that town and I was able to make several industry contacts there, so it was a good trip.

Here is an enormous pot carved out of a single block (I hope I don't get any bad searchers because of using the words 'enormous' and 'pot'). You know how your shadow gets larger when the sun is behind you and casting forward? Well, think about how big this pot is now...

From the rough block form, marble goes through a few steps before it gets to the tile that you might walk across in your garage or coat closet. First, they saw these blocks down into smaller block pieces that they then further saw down into slabs (used commonly for countertops, etc). They then take some of the slabs and saw those down into tiles of various thicknesses and sizes. Typically, they'll put these tiles in a polishing maching to get that 'glossy' finish.

Since I like old looking stuff, I always use the back side of the tile and sand that down to where it's smooth, but not glossy. This state of marble is called 'honed'.

Some chunks of the big blocks are left in larger pieces which they carve fireplaces and things like that from. In the industry, these pieces are called 'cut-to-size'. I need to get some of these pieces for some statuary that I want to do, but it's a bit costly since even a piece big enough to carve a lifesized head would weigh around 300 lbs.

Strange Photos and Sundials (Fotografie Bizzaro e Orologi del Sole)

My camera phone saw a few strange things today. An experimental street light at the Dallas Museum of Art's sculpture garden... Maybe they didn't think it all the way through.




















On the way to work, I saw a horse getting hauled off to jail after obviously being arrested. I wonder what it did? It looked very guilty.
















My elevator on the 48th floor was having all 660 feet of cable replaced because the old ones were fraying and about to snap (kidding, they were reclaiming the much more valuable copper, I think). Maybe I'll run down the stairs this afternoon instead of taking the elevator (stairs actually take 6 minutes and 30 seconds).
















Over by Southfork Ranch, someone left a few stacks of gigantic number 2 pencils, they must have forgotten the sharpener.













Sunlight streamed in this morning and hit my muse bust in exactly the right proportions to make it light up as if intentional. This made me think of how that actually probably only happens exactly right once every year. Kind of like the Office episode where all the characters are watching the screen saver to bounce in *exactly* one of the corners in pure diagonal movement.

And this is the roundabout way of getting to the subject of time in the ancient world. In antiquity there were a few obvious ways of telling time better than looking up and just observing the sun's location.

One way was to burn accurate candles. In order for it to be big enough for a whole city to see, can you imagine the Roman equivalent of Big Ben being replaced each day? But it would probably be nothing but trouble, since Roman candles shoot firey exploding balls all over the place.




















Another way to tell time which had been around for a while was the water clock. But its operation was somewhat sketchy in freezing weather, plus they didn't have electric pumps to refill the water all the time.

The sundials however, were accurate on most sunny days. They even used the sundials to calibrate the water clocks. So maybe it was sundial during the day waterclock at night? Plus, the sundials were portable. Imagine glancing down at this baby on your way to an important business meeting on the Palantine (Collis Palatium).















I might just be motivated enough to build me a proper sundial that throws down shadows and also points out mosaic months of the year. You know, in case my water clock goes dry. Ooops, its a shade past time to go...