Published in 1976, this Stan Lee Presents: The Mighty Marvel Comics Strength and Fitness Book is truly amazing and quite rare. New from $719.20.
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Poem of the Day
Unbelievably modern, the Chinese cites of Guangzhou, Shanghai, Shenzhen get the timelapse treatment from Artem Sergeevich (with his awesome timelapse of Moscow).
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Cliffs of Moher
By Boris Mitendorfer Photography
Going There
by Jack Gilbert
Of course it was a disaster.
The unbearable, dearest secret
has always been a disaster.
The danger when we try to leave.
Going over and over afterward
what we should have done
instead of what we did.
But for those short times
we seemed to be alive. Misled,
misused, lied to and cheated,
certainly. Still, for that
little while, we visited
our possible life.
After struggling with Alzheimer's for a number of years, Jack Gilbert passed this morning (November 13, 2012) in San Francisico, CA. This is the second of his poems we've featured here ("Tear It Down" was the first).
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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.
Read MoreFractal 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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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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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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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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Poem of the Day
Really great stuff. I think I clicked through all 100 Greatest Sports Photos. Most all of them I recognized.
French artist Olivier Ratsi produced these presidential digital collages – glitchy amalgams of the presidential portrait.
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Timelapse Map
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.
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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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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"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.”
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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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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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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5 of the best.
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Timelapse Map
Some of the most amazing people doing amazing things (yay GoPro!).
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Timelapse Map
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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![Poem of the Day [VIDEO] — The Ecstasy by Philip Lopate](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5005d21ac4aa55eb76ab5f3b/1472163162494-64Q6LZ82P9ALRIRKAT8B/lopate.jpg)
