It's no secret that I like apps (see here), and I am know to wax rhapsodic about them. But this one I am so excited by. It is a powerful, gorgeous 3D model of space on your iPhone or iPad. It's called Solar Walk.
What do you think? Am I right?
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Poem of the Day
Timelapse Map
Revisiting this gorgeous tilt-shift timelapse of Rio during the Carnaval.
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These are outstanding ways to traumatize your kids and feel amazingly smart at the same time. Anyone have anything along these lines? Ideas? I am looking for super ideas here...
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Poem of the Day
A timelapse project to capture America's scenes without people in them. The first city to get the treatment is San Francisco.
Tear It Down
by Jack Gilbert
We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows. By redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.
We can break through marriage into marriage.
By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade mouth-deep into love.
We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
But going back toward childhood will not help.
The village is not better than Pittsburgh.
Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.
Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound
of racoon tongues licking the inside walls
of the garbage tub is more than the stir
of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not
enough. We die and are put into the earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within the body.
Gilbert hasn't been one of those names that people recognize as a phenomenal poet for most of his career. He will be.
Poems of the Day
A close-up view of this amazing bit of our history and technological aspirations!? Yes please.
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If you are a fan of Hayao Miyazaki's great films, especially ones like Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, then I bet you'll like this animated sequence called GLOAM. It's got a lot of the creepy wonderful imagery I love so much from Miyazaki.
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Gift Guides
Archaic Torso of Apollo
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
The steady eye of RIlke and his ability to bring the invisible just to the edge of visibility have always made him some one I always feel I can feast on.
Other Poems of the Day
Faint Music
by Robert Hass
Maybe you need to write a poem about grace.
When everything broken is broken,
and everything dead is dead,
and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt,
and the heroine has studied her face and its defects
remorselessly, and the pain they thought might,
as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves
has lost its novelty and not released them,
and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly,
watching the others go about their days—
likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears—
that self-love is the one weedy stalk
of every human blossoming, and understood,
therefore, why they had been, all their lives,
in such a fury to defend it, and that no one—
except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool
of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic
life’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light,
faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears.
As in the story a friend told once about the time
he tried to kill himself. His girl had left him.
Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash.
He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge,
the bay side, a blue, lucid afternoon.
And in the salt air he thought about the word “seafood,”
that there was something faintly ridiculous about it.
No one said “landfood.” He thought it was degrading to the rainbow perch
he’d reeled in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rockbass,
scales like polished carbon, in beds of kelp
along the coast—and he realized that the reason for the word
was crabs, or mussels, clams. Otherwise
the restaurants could just put “fish” up on their signs,
and when he woke—he’d slept for hours, curled up
on the girder like a child—the sun was going down
and he felt a little better, and afraid. He put on the jacket
he’d used for a pillow, climbed over the railing
carefully, and drove home to an empty house.
There was a pair of her lemon yellow panties
hanging on a doorknob. He studied them. Much-washed.
A faint russet in the crotch that made him sick
with rage and grief. He knew more or less
where she was. A flat somewhere on Russian Hill.
They’d have just finished making love. She’d have tears
in her eyes and touch his jawbone gratefully. “God,”
she’d say, “you are so good for me.” Winking lights,
a foggy view downhill toward the harbor and the bay.
“You’re sad,” he’d say. “Yes.” “Thinking about Nick?”
“Yes,” she’d say and cry. “I tried so hard,” sobbing now,
“I really tried so hard.” And then he’d hold her for a while—
Guatemalan weavings from his fieldwork on the wall—
and then they’d fuck again, and she would cry some more,
and go to sleep.
And he, he would play that scene
once only, once and a half, and tell himself
that he was going to carry it for a very long time
and that there was nothing he could do
but carry it. He went out onto the porch, and listened
to the forest in the summer dark, madrone bark
cracking and curling as the cold came up.
It’s not the story though, not the friend
leaning toward you, saying “And then I realized—,”
which is the part of stories one never quite believes.
I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain
it must sometimes make a kind of singing.
And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps—
First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing.
Actually reposting this from 5thin.gs/january-23-2012. It was one of the first timelapses that just seemed to begged to be placed on a map like this.
The Gate by Marie Howe
A Hot Yogi - Kelly Prince
Timelapse Map
Why have I never learned to do this?
Map of Timelapse Videos
The videos we've posted, on a map. Check back for more.
Tom Ryaboi brings us this stunning timelapse video shot from way up high in Toronto.
Recent Posts
Hua Tunan (画图男) is a rising artist in China. With a name that roughly translates to "Painter Man", and by combining traditional Chinese art elements with a brash pop of color and culture, Hua is grabbing attention in a lot of circles, including Volvo (see below):
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"Between 1922 and 1932, Soviet architects enjoyed one of the most fruitful decades of the century. Commissions were plentiful (some called it the “golden season”), and architects had amazing freedom to experiment with new ideas about how Socialism expressed itself at home and in the workplace. That all came to a severe halt in 1932, when Stalin consolidated Russia’s architects into one centralized, neoclassical school."
Chicago’s Graham Foundation hosts a new exhibit, The Lost Vanguard, collecting the images of Richard Pare, a photographer who sniffed out the fragments of this lost school of architecture in the fallen Soviet Union. More than 15,000 shots have been exhibited at MoMA and published in Lost Vanguard: Russian Modernist Architecture 1922-1932.
A extended focus was put on the work of Konstantin Melnikov, his personal home--a cerebral, elegant cylinder punctured with diamond-shaped windows-- a favorite subject.
Being able to see all the time and movement details is one of the benefits of filming with an amazing Phantom HD camera. It makes this skateboarding downright magical.
Here is a trailer for what looks like a fascinating exploration of the relationship between urban centers and the rivers that once supported them.
"Once upon a time, in almost every city, many rivers flowed. Why did they disappear? How? And could we see them again? This documentary tries to find answers by meeting visionary urban thinkers, activists and artists from around the world."
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