"We spend our morning
in the flower stalls counting
the dark tongues of bells
that hang from ropes waiting
for the silence of an hour."
3 - Ten Rupees: Portraits from India
A collection of portraits taken in India by Irish photographer Kevin Goss-Ross.
Also check out
There She Is by Linda Gregg
Lush Game of Thrones painted portraits
5 - NYC Timelapse (Complete with Heroic Speech and Music)
I have mixed feelings about laying a speech from Bobby Kennedy over this beautiful timelapse treatment of NYC. It IS stirring and inspiring. My feelings about the music are NOT mixed.
Also check out:
There She Is by Linda Gregg
A Screenwriter - Philip Gawthorne
The Ancient Silk Road
POTD - There She Is by Linda Gregg
"...I think
I am supposed to look. I am not supposed
to turn away. I am supposed to see each detail
and all expression gone..."
1 - Neil Young's Gorgeous 17-minute video for Ramada Inn
Mid-20th-Century archival footage of driving has the tone that is recognizable to anyone who has listened to and loved Neil Young's music.
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My Pick - 5 things to buy an aspiring screenwriter
PHILIP GAWTHORNE
A screenwriter and playwright from the United Kingdom, Gawthorne has written extensively for BBC television, his stage plays have been performed throughout London and New York, and he is now working primarily in film.
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2 - Art.sy - A Genome Project for the World of Art
Much like Pandora uses an analytical approach to mapping your tastes to their music offering, the new Art focused site Art.sy aims to map your taste in art to its art offerings.
"Art.sy’s goal is to expose as many people as possible to art. Currently, our growing collection comprises 17,000+ artworks by 3,000+ artists from leading galleries, museums, private collections, foundations, and artist estates. Art.sy works with 300+ of the world’s leading galleries, museums, private collections, foundations, and artist estates from New York to London, Paris to Shanghai, Johannesburg to São Paulo."
3 - Harsh First Reviews of Now Cherish Books
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
“It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.” – Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The Atlantic, “Literature as an Art,” 1867
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Mr. Scott Fitzgerald deserves a good shaking. Here is an unmistakable talent unashamed of making itself a motley to the view. The Great Gatsby is an absurd story, whether considered as romance, melodrama, or plain record of New York high life.” — L.P Hartley, The Saturday Review, 1925
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
“Mr. Melville is evidently trying to ascertain how far the public will consent to be imposed upon. He is gauging, at once, our gullibilty and our patience. Having written one or two passable extravagancies, he has considered himself privileged to produce as many more as he pleases, increasingly exaggerated and increasingly dull…. In bombast, in caricature, in rhetorical artifice — generally as clumsy as it is ineffectual — and in low attempts at humor, each one of his volumes has been an advance among its predecessors…. Mr. Melville never writes naturally. His sentiment is forced, his wit is forced, and his enthusiasm is forced. And in his attempts to display to the utmost extent his powers of “fine writing,” he has succeeded, we think, beyond his most sanguine expectations… We have no intention of quoting any passages just now from Moby-Dick. The London journals, we understand, “have bestowed upon the work many flattering notices,” and we should be loth to combat such high authority. But if there are any of our readers who wish to find examples of bad rhetoric, involved syntax, stilted sentiment and incoherent English, we will take the liberty of recommending to them this precious volume of Mr. Melville’s.” — New York United States Magazine and Democratic Review, 1852
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
“[American Psycho] is ”throughout numbingly boring, and for much of the time deeply and extremely disgusting. Not interesting-disgusting, but disgusting-disgusting: sickening, cheaply sensationalist, pointless except as a way of earning its author some money and notoriety.” — Andrew Motion, The Observer, 1991
Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
On Where the Wild Things Are: “The plan and technique of the illustrations are superb. … But they may well prove frightening, accompanied as they are by a pointless and confusing story.” — Publisher’s Weekly, 1963
4 - Timelapse Along the Silk Road
Chris Northey shot these timelapses along the ancient Silk Road from China to Uzbekistan. Beijing and Xi'an in China, Turpan and Kashgar. Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, Tashkent, Bukhara and Samarkand.
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POTD - The Rain by Robert Creeley
The Rain
All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.
What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it
that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me
something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.
Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out
of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.
I had the great privilege of meeting Robert Creeley on several occasions and then carry on a bit of a correspondance with him for a few months. Initially I was so struck by his resemblance to my own father, even down to the one blind/bad eye. But what emerged in our emails was much more connection than instruction. His reading suggestions to me were not pat suggestions but had all the marks of his having listened and read. I can only hope that I was able to give him something, anything in return.
5 - Chasing Ice, Offical Trailer
From PetaPixel:
In the spring of 2005, National Geographic photographer James Balog headed to the Arctic on a tricky assignment: to capture images to help tell the story of the Earth’s changing climate.
[...] Chasing Ice is the story of one man’s mission to change the tide of history by gathering undeniable evidence of our changing planet. Within months of that first trip to Iceland, the photographer conceived the boldest expedition of his life: The Extreme Ice Survey. With a band of young adventurers in tow, Balog began deploying revolutionary time-lapse cameras across the brutal Arctic to capture a multi-year record of the world’s changing glaciers.
[...] It takes years for Balog to see the fruits of his labor. His hauntingly beautiful videos compress years into seconds and capture ancient mountains of ice in motion as they disappear at a breathtaking rate. Chasing Ice depicts a photographer trying to deliver evidence and hope to our carbon-powered planet.
1 - Surreal Photo Mosaics
There is something about these Composites by Patrick Winfield, (made up of individual instant photographs) that feel a lot like memory, shifting slightly with your gaze, fitting all together, the same and different. Lovely.
2 - The Neurology of Storytelling
From Brain Pickings coverage of The Moral Molecule: The Source of Love and Prosperity:
"Stories are powerful because they transport us into other people’s worlds but, in doing that, they change the way our brains work and potentially change our brain chemistry — and that’s what it means to be a social creature."
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3 - The Boy Who Wanted To Be A Lion
Animation has certainly shown itself to be capable of rich imagination and subtle expression (もののけ姫 (Princess Mononoke), for example) . This short animation from Alois Di Leo is moving and amazing:
"Max is a seven-year-old deaf boy growing up in the 1960s. One day he goes on a school trip to the zoo, where he sees a lion for the first time. A feeling begins to grow inside him that will change his life forever."
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POTD - Dream Song 29 by John Berryman
Dream Song 29
There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.
And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.
But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.
Source: The Dream Songs (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1991)
Berryman's voice, immutable through all its transformations, speaks with such a bright-dark thread.
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Wall Toons
Created by the talented Joanne Lurie, in a street-animation style reminiscent of the legendary film Muto by Blu. joannalurie.com.
Truly outstanding, each frame has the same characters, in a different moment, on a different wall about Paris.
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1 - Charting All of LOST
“I think the ultimate motivation is to continue enjoying something that has already finished. Lostalgia…. On the other hand is a research about how information visualization can be used to tell stories,” Ortiz, the creator of the visualization tells us. “That idea (infoviz as storytelling tool) is not new at all, but in this project the use of storytelling is much more obvious because it’s actually a story re-telling (with summit in the view mode called 'reenactment’).”
View the Project: LOSTALGIA
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POTD - Mayakovsky by Frank O'Hara (and read by Don Draper)
Mayakovsky
BY FRANK O'HARA
1
My heart’s aflutter!
I am standing in the bath tub
crying. Mother, mother
who am I? If he
will just come back once
and kiss me on the face
his coarse hair brush
my temple, it’s throbbing!
then I can put on my clothes
I guess, and walk the streets.
2
I love you. I love you,
but I’m turning to my verses
and my heart is closing
like a fist.
Words! be
sick as I am sick, swoon,
roll back your eyes, a pool,
and I’ll stare down
at my wounded beauty
which at best is only a talent
for poetry.
Cannot please, cannot charm or win
what a poet!
and the clear water is thick
with bloody blows on its head.
I embrace a cloud,
but when I soared
it rained.
3
That’s funny! there’s blood on my chest
oh yes, I’ve been carrying bricks
what a funny place to rupture!
and now it is raining on the ailanthus
as I step out onto the window ledge
the tracks below me are smoky and
glistening with a passion for running
I leap into the leaves, green like the sea
4
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.
The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.
It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.
Frank O’Hara, “Mayakovsky” from Meditations in an Emergency. Copyright © 1957 by Frank O’Hara. Reprinted by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc..
Source: Meditations in an Emergency (Grove/Atlantic Inc., 1996)
Don Draper does a bit of justice to the inimitable Frank O'Hara.
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2 - Kuduro
Kuduro is a music, dance and fashion culture emerging from an Angolan sub-culture.
Os Kuduristas is a global program launching in Paris, Amsterdam and Stockholm this September 2012 to promote and raise awareness of Kuduro.
POTD - ALL HALLOWS by Louise Glück
All Hallows
by Louise Glück
Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
Sleep in their blue yoke,
The fields having been
Picked clean, the sheaves
Bound evenly and piled at the roadside
Among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:
This is the barrenness
Of harvest or pestilence
And the wife leaning out the window
With her hand extended, as in payment,
And the seeds
Distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one
And the soul creeps out of the tree.
One fall, while teaching at a girl's high school in Taipei, I decided to have students memorize and recite this poem. Two years later when I returned to teach another term, some of the students ran up to recite it in its entirety. Glück's words seem to just fall into place.
