After sitting in one of those chairs again at the museum, I want to renegotiate with my family! Boy, are those things comfortable... and I have a new appreciation for the design after seeing the rest of the show. Worth checking out if you happen to be in New York.

Not in New York but want to learn more about Charles and Ray Eames? The Library of Congress has an online exhibit on them.

More information is available at Design Within Reach's website.

A few years ago, I got bamboo floors put in my old place. Now we're in a new house and talking about doing a remodel, and the first thing that came to mind was bamboo again. I looked up the supplier from last time, PlyBoo. They now offer not only many varieties of bamboo flooring, but something called "Durapalm." It looks lovely in the picture.

They say:

Our Durapalm® palmwood comes from plantation grown coconut palms, which are in abundance throughout much of the world. Palms produce nuts for up to 80 years, then non-producing palms are removed and replaced. Coconut palmwood can vary greatly in color and density. We use only the hard, dark palm for our look and durable surface. Durapalm® palmwood flooring and palmwood plywood are made from multiple layers of palm, creating both stable and durable flooring and plywood products of great beauty.

As the rainforest continues to be tapped for timber needs, coconut palms have been an overlooked and under utilized resource. We hope that through our work, palmwood will one day be recognized as a valuable building resource and help reduce rainforest harvesting.

I'll want to find out more...

I've been having a lot of fun in my jewelry class recently. After being in a bit of a rut for a while, I've finally started trying some different projects. The one pictured here is a decorated box suspended on snake chain. The sides are connected to each other and the chain with jump rings.

Another project I enjoyed was this necklace of linked circles. Perhaps "circles" isn't quite the precise word, because it's not a precise necklace. The loops are formed by rolling out a clay "snake", mashing the ends together and then squishing the whole thing against a textured surface. Then you have to cut some of the loops in order to be able to link them together. You're supposed to keep the same textured surfaced on hand so you can texture some more clay over the join and disguise it... but of course, the texture I picked went missing. So I went back to my old standby, leaves.

And speaking of leaves, here is an example of my rut. Not that I'm complaining; I think this is probably my most successful project. I've been making lots of these little decorated tube beads. String one on a silver chain, and it's a very simple, subtle accessory.

If you live in the East Bay, I can't recommend Hadar Jacobson's classes enough. Every week, she's come up with something new, and even after the end of a long day at work, her enthusiasm is contagious.

This year, he's moved on to another subject: the fate of the Ohlone when the white people showed up, and brought their diseases with them. For the past several months, he's been painting the wall outside Gaylord's coffeehouse on Piedmont Avenue. As it has approached completion, it's drawn a lot of attention...

The 25-by-10-foot mural on the side of Gaylord's Caffe Espresso at 41st Street and Piedmont Avenue shows Franciscan missionaries attempting to clothe an Ohlone Indian and teach him about the tools used in ranching.

On the right, a somewhat shocked modern man and woman look on. On the left — in vivid colors and immaculate detail — Baird depicts the downfall of the Ohlone people and their culture, which thrived in the California coastal area between Point Sur and the San Francisco Bay until the 1700s.

The painting shows a sickly green and twisted person whose body is ravaged by smallpox, measles and other European diseases. There is an evil-looking conquistador grabbing or wrestling with a man who turns into a ghost under protest.

"It shows that through all the oppression, the soul of a person still remains intact and escapes those binds," Baird said. "A spirit of a person can't be boxed."

The mural, "The Capture of the Solid. The Escape of the Soul," was completed in six months with the help of a $5,000 Oakland City Cultural Arts grant.

While it shows the struggles of American Indians, the acrylic painting is also about perceptions and the attachments people have to those perceptions, said the 30-year-old Baird, who last year completed "La Vida Electrica Mantiene," a mural about the Key System railway at Key Route Plaza in Piedmont.

"The Franciscans show up and their perception is (the American Indians) are people without clothing and (without) Christianity. And their perception is that if they don't have Christianity they must be lost. I don't think they had any evil intentions; they thought they were doing what was best. ... It was their perceptions."

...not all of it positive.

Diane Williams, who said she is Athabascan Indian and lives in East Oakland, spotted the mural after a shopping trip to a Piedmont Avenue market recently.

"He lacked cultural sensitivity big time to think he could have displayed my people without running (the art) by my people," Williams said.

Williams said some of the figures in the mural are not accurate portraits of American Indians.

"We didn't look like that," she said. "We have short legs, long torsos. That (naked) guy, I don't know who he looks like. He has legs that are too long."

Williams, 57, said she is angered that a naked Indian man is featured on the public mural.

"This is just an insult to us," she said. "It could be something to honor us, but instead we are all prancing around naked."

Williams said she polled 50 American Indian friends who were also "appalled by the mural."

"When they depict this type of thing in museums, books, in private pieces of art, or even inside a building, that's one thing. But this is on the outside of a building, and people are forced to see it," she said.

Mr. Baird, whom I've heard is a self-taught artist, did quite a bit of research before starting this project.

Baird, who is not American Indian, said he researched the Ohlone civilization for six months before he began painting.

"California Native-American history is something I was always fascinated by," he said.

During his research, he consulted with Andrew Galvan, the curator of Old Mission Dolores in San Francisco and an Ohlone Indian descendant.

"He constantly provided me with preliminary sketches and drawings. Rocky has been walking the journey with me and keeping me included and taking any thoughts I had into consideration," Galvan said this week.

Those early sketches can be seen at http://www.rockybaird.com and may be part of a July exhibit at the Esteban Sabar Gallery in Oakland.

Galvan called the mural a fantastic project.

"I have been quite pleased with it," he said.

Luckily, he's taking this whole thing in stride.

"I love the First Amendment," he said. "If everyone just walked past it like wallpaper, what would be the point?

"It's absolutely their right (not to like his art)," he said.

"It's not a water faucet. It can't be working or not. It's art."

Native Americans are not the only ones complaining. I heard that one woman was going up and down the avenue trying to get people to sign on to her complaint about the mural, which seemed to focus on the penis of the Ohlone man in the middle of the mural. (She was apparently heard to exclaim, "My husband's penis never looked like that!")

My take? Obviously, I'm a fan of his work. More than that, I'm irritated with the complainers. Again, think of the muralists of the 1930s, or go further back than that to the paintings of the Renaissance, or the murals and sculptures of the Romans. Public art is about symbols. It's about storytelling. It's not mean to to be photorealistic representation. Do people think the ancient Egyptians really thought people could contort their bodies like that? And if you're going to complain about a naked human figure, then you'd better stay out of museums, the U.N., and many other public places... talk about literally ignoring the bigger picture.

I do wish these self-proclaimed critics would find a worthier target. Like Thomas Kinkade. There's some empty obscenity for you!

Not cheap at $12 a pack, but definitely heads and shoulders above the rest. They could even motivate me to finish writing thank-you notes from my wedding nearly two years ago.

(OK, so no notecard seems to have that much power, but still...)

April 1, 2006
10 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Oakland Mariott City Center [map & directions from Google]

This major exhibition is the first to explore the Arts and Crafts movement from a truly international perspective. It traces the development of the movement from its flourishing in Britain in the 1880s to its interpretation and development in America, continental Europe, and Japan. The Arts and Crafts movement was arguably one of the most far reaching and influential design movements of modern times. It laid the foundations for international approaches to design and lifestyle in the 20th century through new attitudes toward work, design and home. Until now, no exhibition has brought together Arts and Crafts from around the world, and none has included Japan.

It sounds fabulous. Furthermore, the exhibit originated at the equally fabulous Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The De Young is getting good shows, and making up for lost time.

• Learn more about this show

Ahem.

I mean, I enjoyed the first Matrix well enough, even if I didn't quite get The Big Message, but the second and third installments convinced me that the whole thing — and its creators — were full of s**t.

But then again, maybe I should give the Weirdo brothers another chance. The new movie, V. for Vendetta, has been earning decent reviews. Beyond that, though, I think this is simply the most attractive movie poster I've seen in some time. I love the typography, with its invocation of Soviet-era graphic design.

(And the Keanu-free cast? A definite plus.)

The Smallest, Coolest Apartment contest is a contest for all small apartments and homes in the lower 48 states under 650 square feet. We are seeking the most ingenious and beautiful 120 submissions along with all the tips and resources we need to maximize our own homes.

Sponsored jointly by blog Apartment Therapy and stylish shop Design Within Reach, the contest offers DWR store credits to the winners.

I followed the contest last year (when the apartments were limited to 500 square feet units in New York) and was fascinated and hooked. (If those people can make such good use of their limited space, why can't I, with space less limited?)

Let me be clear about two things: one, handcrafted furniture like that made by Berkeley Mills (see profile) is not cheap. A standard dining room chair costs about $1,100. Two, I know what it takes to make a chair like that. While my own skills don't measure up to the high level needed to fabricate such a chair from rough planks of hardwood, I have friends who are among that elite, and I have learned from them...

Who can afford six grand for six chairs? A good question. Yet who questions Americans' ability to buy a big-screen TV and a home entertainment center -- a hodgepodge of electronics and particleboard shelving that will be broken or obsolete in a few years -- for the same $6,000? Who questions those same Americans spending $1,100 on "garbage" furniture six times in their lives?

It's a good point... but a moot point for those who don't have $6,000 sitting around waiting to be spent. When recently faced with the dining chair dilemma, we ended up taking ourselves off to Crate and Barrel Outlet in Berkeley, where we found six solid-wood chairs — in a cheery blue color — for $63 each.

We will eschew the big-screen TV and particleboard shelving, though.

My favorite exchange, about a book with a map of Manhattan on the cover shaped like a dangling rat:

- I passed by this book three or four times before I realized why it was so clever. While I'm not especially impressed by the type or layout of the cover, Peter Sis did such a nice job with the illustration, I can?t help but like it. Plus the concept is fairly spot on. The uneven streets where the guts would be is an especially nice touch.

- Thats not guts, thats the paths through central park.

• Visit the Covers website

So it's refreshing to shift attention to a very different kind of art, one where abstraction and pattern are supreme and the written word becomes part of the imagery.

From the L.A. County Museum of Art's website:

Calligraphy is the most important and pervasive element in Islamic art. It has always been considered the noblest form of art because of its association with the Qur’an, the Muslim holy book, which is written in Arabic. This preoccupation with beautiful writing extended to all arts — including secular manuscripts; inscriptions on palaces; and those applied to metalwork, pottery, stone, glass, wood, and textiles — and to non-Arabic-speaking peoples within the Islamic commonwealth whose languages — such as Persian, Turkish, and Urdu — were written in the Arabic script.

Another characteristic of Islamic art is a preference for covering surfaces with patterns composed of geometric or vegetal elements. Complex geometric designs, as well as intricate patterns of vegetal ornament (such as the arabesque), create the impression of unending repetition, which is believed by some to be an inducement to contemplate the infinite nature of God. This type of nonrepresentational decoration may have been developed to such a high degree in Islamic art because of the absence of figural imagery, at least within a religious context.

Contrary to a popular misconception, however, figural imagery is an important aspect of Islamic art. Such images occur primarily in secular and especially courtly arts and appear in a wide variety of media and in most periods and places in which Islam flourished. It is important to note, nevertheless, that representational imagery is almost invariably restricted to a private context. Figurative art is excluded from the decoration of religious monuments. This absence may be attributed to an Islamic antipathy toward anything that might be mistaken for idols or idolatry, which are explicitly forbidden by the Qur’an.

To me, there's something very visually soothing about these works — but exciting too. And somehow, the colors and patterns seem timeless — I'd be hard-pressed to say whether a given piece was created 1200 years ago or last week.

Learn more about Islamic art from:

• Los Angeles County Museum of Art
• Metropolitan Museum

But perhaps even more than the paintings, I enjoy his etchings, which really show the Rembrandt influence, particularly in his series of historical portraits of Jewish holy men. "My father's death in 1939 started me on the path of painting these Jewish sages. It was his religion, not mine, but when he died I felt like I was scoring points for him..."

For more information on this great artist, I recommend two books: Jack Levine, Steven Robert Frankel, Rozzoli, 1989 and The Complete Graphic Work of Jack Levine, Kenneth W. Prescott and Emma-Stina Prescott, Dover Books, 1984.