The Wolf

Uploaded by Alan Bee

Skate Beauty at 120 FPS

A~$20K RED camera captures the pretty.
Features "It's Alright" by Barði Jóhannsson, an Icelander known as "Bang Gang".

No One Will Keep Us From Seeing

Codex Reperio Wordled

I took about 10,000 words I'd written from this blog and worked it through Wordle to get this funky "word cloud" above, based on frequency of usage. Loving the dadaist juxtaposition.

Then I put the entire text of Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse through and tweaked the formatting a little further to get the result below. My vote for the cover of the 90th anniversary edition.

Refined Design

I visited an Amsterdam design studio last week and got my aesthetic schooled by some serious pro's. The pic above is a perfectly understated little piece;

a vase, textured in braille, with a poem about flowers.

Love Earth

Filmed over five years in more than 200 different locations by 40 specialist crews, Earth is a feature-length portrayal of our planet over a one year period. As a companion piece to the beautiful BBC television series Planet Earth, expectations are set for a truly incredible film.

Arriving in UK cinemas today, there is also a gorgeous website featuring a delicious trailer, a delightful soundtrack, production information and video introductions to the film's chief protagonists- the humpback whale, the polar bear and the African elephant. Prepare to fall in love with the world again.

The Dream That Must Be Interpreted

"This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief. But there's a difference with this dream. Everything cruel and unconscious done in the illusion of the present world, all that does not fade away at the death-waking. It stays, and it must be interpreted...

And this groggy time we live, this is what it's like: A man goes to sleep in the town where he has always lived, and he dreams he's living in another town. In the dream, he doesn't remember the town he's sleeping in his bed in. He believes the reality of the dream town. The world is that kind of sleep.

The dust of many crumbled cities settles over us like a forgetful doze, but we are older than those cities. We began as a mineral. We emerged into plant life and into the animal state, and then into being human, and always we have forgotten our former states, except in early spring when we slightly recall being green again.

That's how a young person turns toward a teacher. That's how a baby leans toward the breast, without knowing the secret of its desire, yet turning instinctively. Humankind is being led along an evolving course, through this migration of intelligences, and though we seem to be sleeping, there is an inner wakefulness that directs the dream, and that will eventually startle us back to the truth of who we are."

Rumi (مولانا جلال الدین محمد رومی)

Artwork; Caspar David Friedrich's The Wanderer above a sea of fog

The interview: Robert Pirsig

"At 78, Robert Pirsig, probably the most widely read philosopher alive, can look back on many ideas of himself. There is the nine-year-old-boy with the off-the-scale IQ of 170, trying to work out how to connect with his classmates in Minnesota. There is the young GI in Korea picking up a curiosity for Buddhism while helping the locals with their English. There is the radical, manic teacher in Montana making his freshmen sweat over a definition of 'quality'. There is the homicidal husband sectioned into a course of electric-shock treatment designed to remove all traces of his past. There is the broken-down father trying to bond with his son on a road trip. There is the best-selling author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, offering solutions to the anxieties of a generation. And there is, for a good many years, the reclusive yachtsman,
trying to steer a course away from cultish fame.

Pirsig doesn't do interviews, as a rule; he claims this one will be his last. He got spooked early on. 'In the first week after I wrote Zen I gave maybe 35,' he says, in his low, quick-fire Midwestern voice, from behind his sailor's beard. 'I found it very unsettling. I was walking by the post office near home and I thought I could hear voices, including my own. I had a history of mental illness, and I thought: it's happening again. Then I realised it was the radio broadcast of an interview I'd done. At that point I took a camper van up into the mountains and started to write Lila, my second book...'"

Tim Adams full interview with Robert Pirsig at The Observer.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance continues to hold it's place in the list of books I will take to the desert island when the time comes. It's three stories blended remarkably into one; a philosophical enquiry into quality, a tale of madness and remembering, and a motorcycle road trip across America. I read it over a long weekend's escape to Botswana and promptly bought a motorbike and a lot of philosophy books in it's wake. If you haven't read it, do so. And if you do, say hi to Phædrus for me...

Amy Winehouse - In My Bed

(Click to launch video clip and fall madly in love with Amy Winehouse)

Exit the System

by sputnikk

on the streets of Bolzano, Italy

Taken from The Wooster Collective- a site dedicated to ephemeral art placed on streets in cities around the world. (Thanks, Tilly!)

The Fog of War- Marlene Dumas

I finally took time to stop and read this poem; part of an art installation by Marlene Dumas. It hangs in a cultureless corridor filled with art, that I'd passed dozens of times on the way to my office. I wonder if I'm the only person whose stopped to read it, and if any others did whether they too shivered at the realisation of the vacuum surrounding them.

Rodney Smith: Surreal

Skyline, Hudson River, New York, 1995.

More elegant Rodney Smith surreality at the John Clearly Gallery.

The blossom tree

The blossom tree
Brett Whiteley
1971 – 1982
oil, silk flowers, branch, wood, canvas, nails and electricity on board
186 x 194.5 x 25.6 cm
Link

2006 World Press Photo

Migrants wait for transportation, Tenerife, Spain, 7 September 2006. By Arturo Rodríguez, Spain, The Associated Press. "Spot News: 2nd prize singles"

Arturo was a recipient of the 2006 World Press Photo awards, announced yesterday. Davide Monteleone of Italy has a very powerful series on the Israeli bombings of Lebanon that is well worth reflecting upon. "Spot News: 1st prize stories".

The Adoration of the Adoration

I have just returned from an incredible few days in Florence with Monika. Soon I shall write the gushing, hyperbolic prose of a new-worlder decended briefly upon this examplar of the Renaissance. For now, I post a picture that had me completely transfixed within the 430 year old Uffizi Gallery; Leonardo's unfinished Adoration of the Magi.

(click to enlarge)

Easter Island

Stone statues of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) by a Dutch photographer, Wouter Velthuis.
This is my way of saying that RSS and Atom feeds are now available on my blog.

Angelina

Peter Elungat uses thick oil paint straight from the tube in this painting of Angelina - a mystical figure of the magical and spiritual world.

Faith by David Whyte

I want to write about faith
about the way the moon rises
over cold snow night after night

faithful even as it fades from fullness
slowly becoming the last curving and impossible
sliver of light before the final darkness
but I have no faith in myself
I refuse to give it the smallest entry

Let this then, my small poem,
like a new moon, slender and barely open,
be the first prayer that opens me to faith

- David Whyte

Photo from Blue Ridge Muse

Destino

In 1945 collaboration began between the ubergenius Salvador Dalí and Walt Disney to produce an animated Dali- almost a tautology in itself. Financial woes intervened and all that was released was a precious 18 seconds of footage. In 1999, Walt Disney's nephew, Roy Disney, unearthed the dormant project and with a team of 25 animators deciphered the storyboards and finished the timeless masterpiece.

(A Disney trailer for Destino)

I was blessed in early 2005 to see the full six-minute production and a collection of stills from the work- right here in the Netherlands. It was, and is, the most beautiful film I have ever seen. An animated Dali has a fourth dimension of fluidity- a dimension that is hinted at in every painting, but finally, here in these six delicate minutes, is brought to it's ultimate creation.

Buddhabrot

And before I forget here is something very, very nice.



Buddabrot "generated using a technique I developed to render the mandelbrot set... Note that even though the images resemble Hindu art, they were actually generated completely automatically, without any sort of human artistic intervention." Link.

The Tacheles

On Oranienburger Strasse in Berlin there is an apartment building called the Kunst Haus Tacheles - or simply "the Tacheles". Since the fall of the wall the Tacheles has been occupied by artists, performers and musicians who create and exhibit there. The structure of the building has been damaged by shelling in the war and fire and dereliction since; anywhere else in Germany it would have already been demolished and replaced. More interesting than the art on display were the surfaces and spaces of the building itself. Monika and I took the series of photos below to capture the feeling of this Berlin icon.

A little Dali for mothersday. A salute to all those who have born, raised, let go of and rediscovered their children.