Avanaut (aka Vesa Lehtimäki) and his use of light, perspective and inexpensive props, produced some very cool dramatic scenes full of motion with miniatures and models.
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POTD - The City by C.P. Cavafy
The City
BY C. P. CAVAFY
TRANSLATED BY EDMUND KEELEY AND PHILIP SHERRARD
You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried like something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”
You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You’ll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.
Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.
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.
1 - Photobombing Your Own Professional Self
The Photographer of "VJ Day, The Kiss" liked to put himself in the picture. From Marilyn Monroe and Frank Lloyd Wright to Mia Farrow and J. Robert Oppenheimer, Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photographs have captured some of the most iconic images of our shared imagination. So it is a great deal of fun, and a bit of surprise, to see him put himself in the frame.
More Photography
Poem of the Day
2 - Solar Walk - The Stars in Your Hand
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?
More Space
Poem of the Day
Timelapse Map
The City of Samba
Revisiting this gorgeous tilt-shift timelapse of Rio during the Carnaval.
More Tilt Shift
More Videos
4 - Artist Halloween Costumes
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...
More Artists stuff
Poem of the Day
5 - San Francisco Timelapse (Empty America)
A timelapse project to capture America's scenes without people in them. The first city to get the treatment is San Francisco.
1 - Stunning Portland Timelapse
POTD - Tear It Down by Jack Gilbert
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
2 - Space Shuttle Endeavours across LA
A close-up view of this amazing bit of our history and technological aspirations!? Yes please.
More Space stuff
3 - Live Action Miyazaki-style animation
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.
More Animation
Gift Guides
POTD - Archaic Torso of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke
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
POTD - Faint Music by Robert Hass
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.
Hass is undoubtedly the poet who has had the greatest impact on me, both as a reader and as a poet. I was first introduced to his book of prose poems, Human Wishes, and then quickly read my way back through Praise and Field Guide. I still have Meditation at Lagunitas memorized to this day.
4 - Achingly Beautiful Yosemite Timelapse
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
5 - Blowing Underwater Bubble Rings
Why have I never learned to do this?
1 - Women's Water Wigs
2 - Berlin Hyper-lapse
Map of Timelapse Videos
Map of Timelapse Videos
The videos we've posted, on a map. Check back for more.
3 - Toronto Rooftop Timelapse
Tom Ryaboi brings us this stunning timelapse video shot from way up high in Toronto.
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4 - Bright Young Chinese Artist
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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