(Video link here.) In 1964, the great Anthony Quinn, then 49, knocked everyone out with the famous scene in the movie Zorba the Greek where he teaches an uptight Englishman how to dance after his business enterprise goes bust. It remains one of the most life-affirming moments in screen history. You can feel the sun and the sea air, and pure joy. We grew up with it, and with the lovely, alive music of composer Mikos Theodorakis.
We’d forgotten about it until the other day, when a reader sent us a video of Quinn, age 84 – two years before he died – dancing the sirtaki from Zorba the Greek, in a sweet reunion with the composer, his dear old friend. There is a stunning amount of love in it. read more…
We never cease to be amazed at the uses people have come up for shipping pallets. Their boxy form naturally allows for building block type constructions of all kinds. DE-constructed, they afford an unpredictable variety of rustic, often beat-up woods, in roughly 2 or 3-foot lengths. The chicest application we’ve seen lately are these floors made by Arctic Plank.
Arctic Plank “upcycles” the salvaged wood boards, though doesn’t say exactly what that process entails. It looks to us like they sand, stain and finish the boards to create a unique patina. To deal with the short lengths of wood, they smartly cut the planks to make in zigzag, herringbone or parquet patterns. These look much more finished than aligning boards vertically, which makes for a rag-tag look that has a completely different kind of charm. Arctic Plank‘s floors got us thinking about just what the possibilities for shipping pallet floors might be… read more…
Remember the beautiful Chauvet cave paintings we wrote about a few months ago? Well every artist needs his or her toolkit, and archeologists recently discovered what appear to be “artist kits” in a South African cave. The kits, which date back 100,000 years, are made of abalone shells, perfect for holding and transporting essential painting materials: a quartzite stone for grinding up pigments like charcoal and ochre – which produces rich reds and yellows – and the pigments themselves. The ground pigments were poured into the shell and mixed with a liquid to make paint. One of the kits held a slender bone from the front leg of a wolf or dog with one end dipped in ochre: a possible paint brush. The kits are the first known instance of homo sapiens compounding a painting medium. Charcoal and ochre are the same materials used in the Chauvet cave, but those paintings are only 30,000 years old.
The desire to create is built into our very DNA. Our lineage is full of artists… read more…
Conceptual Artist Myeongbeom Kim makes eerily beautiful and evocative work that fuses manmade things with big doses of nature. We can totally see ourselves lying down on this bed, and feeling like we are in a mossy woods…
…we can imagine how we’d feel riding an elevator like this one: read more…
A friend recently sent us a postcard with this image; it’s called Leaping the Chasm at Stand Rock, Wisconsin Dells, 1887 by Henry Hamilton Bennett. On the back she wrote: “…thought it was an appropriate image for this phase of your life – taking risk, eager to have a new perspective/vantage point, lots of momentum for this jump, etc” .
We don’t know when a post card has packed more of punch. With it came such good wishes and recognition, we felt like we drank a tonic.
It’s partly the power of snail mail, because snail mail means someone has taken the time to write – in effect, to make – and send something tangible, giving the words all the more power. It’s REAL; we can tape it on our wall and be reminded of so much.
(Video link here.) After hearing a lot of very kind and reverent words about Steve Jobs lately, Walter Isaacson’s new biography about him, apparently balancing the picture, which we can’t help but think is a good thing. The guy was brilliant, but no angel; he was deeply flawed. Ryan Tate of Gawker wrote just this in his piece What Everyone Is Too Polite To Say About Steve Jobs an outline of the other side of Jobs, which include authoritarianism, rough treatment of underlings, tolerant of abusive working conditions in Apple factories overseas….This is the same guy who gave his famously uplifting commencement speech, who said “Death is life’s change agent.”
We’ve heard similar combo-platters of gifts and faults with a number of famous people (and experienced it working for some). And this past year, three of our dear friends passed away. The were all much loved, creative, valiant and very generous people who had harsh, often dark, sides as well.
For years we’ve enjoyed a mantle with no fireplace. It was taken out of an old house in Maine; it’s color, an ochre yellow milk paint. It leans as a sort of sculpture against the living room wall, defining the space in a unique way, and just like that, it is a pleasure. Then some images of fireplaces in modernist dollhouses (which are in themselves amazing) got us thinking about implementing the idea of “fire”, even without an actual fireplace: making some sort of trompe l’oeil image of fire… read more…
If you’re a kid, one of the pleasures of trick-or-treating is AFTERWARDS, when you’ve got a big stash of candy. Maria Robledo sent us this photo of her daughte Isabel’s haul: “she organizes her Halloween catch & stashes it conveniently under the couch for easy access while reading…”
, apparently balancing the picture, which we can’t help but think is a good thing. The guy was brilliant, but no angel; he was deeply flawed. Ryan Tate of Gawker wrote just this in his piece 
