Video is the new reading, the new literacy. And that makes videographers (camera operators, directors of photography, etc etc) the new scribes, wielding immense power in the capturing and communication of ideas and experiences.
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3 - Gorgeous Fractal-made Flowers
Fractal art isn't drawn or captured, but rather programmed. The visualization of complex equations. Italy-born Silvia Cordedda has only been at it since January 2012, but clearly has the touch.
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POTD - Gacela of the Dark Death by Federico García Lorca
Gacela of the Dark Death
by Federico García Lorca
translated by Robert Bly
I want to sleep the sleep of the apples,
I want to get far away from the busyness of the cemeteries.
I want to sleep the sleep of that child
who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.
I don't want them to tell me again how the corpse keeps all its blood,
how the decaying mouth goes on begging for water.
I'd rather not hear about the torture sessions the grass arranges for
nor about how the moon does all its work before dawn
with its snakelike nose.
I want to sleep for half a second,
a second, a minute, a century,
but I want everyone to know that I am still alive,
that I have a golden manger inside my lips,
that I am the little friend of the west wind,
that I am the elephantine shadow of my own tears.
When it's dawn just throw some sort of cloth over me
because I know dawn will toss fistfuls of ants at me,
and pour a little hard water over my shoes
so that the scorpion claws of the dawn will slip off.
Because I want to sleep the sleep of the apples,
and learn a mournful song that will clean all earth away from me,
because I want to live with that shadowy child
who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.
Lorca was a bit of a pilgrimage for me. First his time with his cohorts of the Generación del 27 at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, and then his room at Columbia. His surrealistic vision has always been thrilling and moving to me.
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4 - The Flawed Symmetry of Prediction: Expressive Timelapse Project
I don't know what this is or how to explain it. Its effect however is mesmerizing. Expressive, engaging, gorgeous and visually stunning.
Flawed Symmetry of Prediction is an outstanding short film by filmmaker Jeff Frost:
"I roam the deserts of California and Utah looking for abandoned structures. When I find a room that I like, I paint large scale optical illusions on the inside of it. I record this process with time lapse photography. It took me over half a year and more than 40,000 high resolution still images to produce this film on my Canon 60D. Aside from painting supplies, the only other equipment I used was a borrowed tripod, and some pretty unconventional lighting. As post production goes, no graphics or CGI was used whatsoever."
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5 - Timelapse Coincidentally Captures a Fire in Downtown Montreal
Photographer Evan Kitaljevich writes,
This was honestly my first attempt at making a time-lapse. I downloaded/figured out LRtimelapse (the trial version) in the afternoon then went out around sunset to shoot [...] Pan and zoom were added in post [...] To anyone who wants to try this, my best advice is to use a really sturdy (possibly weighed down) tripod. I wish I had one, because shooting with a GorillaPod in a bit of wind made the camera shake between frames. I used the AE warp stabilizer to try and smooth it out, but it still looks a bit weird and wobbly.
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1 - Sports Illustrated's 100 Greatest Sports Photos
Really great stuff. I think I clicked through all 100 Greatest Sports Photos. Most all of them I recognized.
2 - Composited Presidential Faces
French artist Olivier Ratsi produced these presidential digital collages – glitchy amalgams of the presidential portrait.
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POTD - Waiting for the Barbarians by C.P. Cavafy
Waiting for the Barbarians
BY C. P. CAVAFY
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
He’s even got a scroll to give him,
loaded with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.
TRANSLATED BY EDMUND KEELEY AND PHILIP SHERRARD
My first introduction to Cavafy was as the Poet of the City from Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. And then fairly soon after as the poet whose"Waiting for the Barbarians" became the inspiration for the Nobel Laureate J.M. Coatzee's early standout of the same name:Waiting for the Barbarians.
POTD - won't you celebrate with me by lucille clifton
won't you celebrate with me
won't you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
Clifton's voice is both so specifically her own and open enough to allow for access to her lived experience.
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4 - Hand Crank USB Charger
Yeah, if I had the money, I would send these rechargeable hand-crank USB chargers to everyone I know and care about.
Not only is it clearly an essential for emergencies but with our dependence on our phones and tablets, seems like a basic travel essential. I am pre-ordering mine.
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5 - With Tablets, Remote Kids Learn to Teach Themselves
"Earlier this year, One Laptop Per Child workers dropped off closed boxes containing the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. “I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.”
POTD - Every Day You Play by Pablo Neruda
Every Day You Play
by Pablo Neruda
Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water.
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a cluster of fruit, every day, between my hands.
You are like nobody since I love you.
Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.
Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.
Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window.
The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish.
Here all the winds let go sooner or later, all of them.
The rain takes off her clothes.
The birds go by, fleeing.
The wind. The wind.
I can contend only against the power of men.
The storm whirls dark leaves
and turns loose all the boats that were moored last night to the sky.
You are here. Oh, you do not run away.
You will answer me to the last cry.
Cling to me as though you were frightened.
Even so, at one time a strange shadow ran through your eyes.
Now, now too, little one, you bring me honeysuckle,
and even your breasts smell of it.
While the sad wind goes slaughtering butterflies
I love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth.
How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.
So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,
and over our heads the gray light unwind in turning fans.
My words rained over you, stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
I go so far as to think that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want
to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.
Neruda has such a facility for figure, making metaphor seem almost translucent, something to see through rather than fix your eye on.
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POTD - The Answer by Robinson Jeffers
The Answer
Then what is the answer?—Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know the great civilizations have broken down into violence, and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one’s own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted and not wish for evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will not be fulfilled.
To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars and his history...for contemplation or in fact...
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions, or drown in despair when his days darken.
At first glance, Jeffers seems a bit antagonistic to the human world, a bit unfeeling to people, but a steady gaze on our place in the world is ultimately his great generosity.
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POTD - Empire of Dreams by Charles Simic
Empire of Dreams
On the first page of my dreambook
It’s always evening
In an occupied country.
Hour before the curfew.
A small provincial city.
The houses all dark.
The storefronts gutted.
I am on a street corner
Where I shouldn’t be.
Alone and coatless
I have gone out to look
For a black dog who answers to my whistle.
I have a kind of Halloween mask
Which I am afraid to put on.
Simic, when he reads, has the physical trace of his past, his accent, pressing against his precise and idiomatic language. Quite the charged contrast.
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3 - Hurricane Sandy NYC Timelapses
5 of the best.
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4 - More People are Awesome
Some of the most amazing people doing amazing things (yay GoPro!).
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![Poem of the Day [VIDEO] — The Ecstasy by Philip Lopate](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5005d21ac4aa55eb76ab5f3b/1472163162494-64Q6LZ82P9ALRIRKAT8B/lopate.jpg)
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5 - Cityscape Chicago
Shot incrementally between July and October this year around downtown Chicago, Eric Hines, a photographer/time-lapse cinematographer from Indiana, has recently completed this personal time-lapse piece consisting of over 30,000 still photos.
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1 - Jumbo Jets Look Like Toys in Timelapse
From the Cargospotter aviation video channel of the approach at London’s Heathrow airport. At 17x speed the planes are buffeted by the wind currents like so many toys.
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2 - Ice of Lake Baikal
From Wikipedia:
Lake Baikal is the world's oldest lake, at 25 million years. Located in the south of the Russian region of Siberia, between Irkutsk Oblast to the northwest and the Buryat Republic to the southeast, it is the most voluminous freshwater lake in the world, containing roughly 20% of the world's unfrozen surface fresh water.
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POTD - Now These Objects Will Move by Themselves by Hsia Yü
Now These Objects Will Move by Themselves
by Hsia Yü
Every time you get to thinking this time doesn't count
Every time you come to feel this here and now isn't real
The sound of silk ripping in the air
You run inside as fast you can
Hide yourself
Peering through a crack
Softly say: "Next time, OK."
Just as everything begins to happen you become conscious
Your consciousness is taking the happening
Out of what's happening
But for that one day someday you are able to say:
"Well, actually . . ."
Or maybe
"Once . . ."
Every time you find yourself believing:
"Next time will count far more than this time."
Which is strictly speaking
The next time of the next time
Or the next time ready to rush out
You shout:
"Doesn't count!"
Just as you think of making these objects move by themselves
On account of the fact you're beginning to fidget
Sure enough it all begins to happen
And so we see
A chair moving towards us all by itself
"Just the same it doesn't count."
You say ever so languidly:
"Even that doesn't count doesn't count."
translated from the Chinese by Steve Bradbury
There isn't a lot of contemporary Chinese language that gets translated into to English. Hsia's voice has such structure and shape in what are otherwise featureless worlds.
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