(Video link here; start at 4:50) We had a non-stop day, working on a big project, then racing back to write a post many hours late…wondering if we might write about lateness, or busyness or not-living-up-to-our-obligationness, which so many people we know are trying to figure out. We were poking around the files, half-written posts, and bookmarked bits when we STOPPED to watch a video clip Cara de Silva sent us this morning with these words:
“This is a segment of a TED talk that I found profoundly moving because of the images and the speaker and the narrative. Somehow all together they go beyond the subject.”
On flixxy.com, Cara had found the 4 minute video that filmmaker and TED speaker Louie Schwartzberg had used as an example of what his work as a cinematographer using time-lapse photography had taught him over the years: gratitude. You can watch the whole TED talk, above, or let the video load and jump right into Schwartzberg’s film at 4:50 mins. read more…
We found this beautiful gif of a running scrapwood horse on dvdp, with the caption “horses know how to run with style.”
That’s what we want to do.
(…It’s a clip from the Chemical Brothers video ‘Horse Power’, which we find curiously thrilling watched with the sound off; we felt like we’d been riding a galloping horse…which always shakes things up).
(Video link here.) Every once in a while, if we can’t actually get a dose of REAL nature, we turn to a video of some crazy wonder of the natural world to shift our view. This owl’s identity changes radically depending on his perceived threat level – kind of like many humans we know…
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…
Jansen, who has been working on his beasts for over 20 years, has often referred to their genetic code and ability to reproduce. His ultimate goal is enabling them to live on their own on the beaches of Holland. As he shows in this charmingly awkward Ted talk, his creatures are indeed evolving. The Strandbeests, made entirely of ordinary materials, now have what Jansen calls “a simple brain.” read more…
As much as we love the vertical shipping pallet garden we wrote about in May, it’s flaw is that if you needed to move it off your balcony, you might be in some trouble. Enter the milk crate farm! When the bad economy stalled construction at New York City’s Alexandria Center for Life Science, Chef Sisha Ortuzar and business partner Jeffrey Zurofsky had a brilliant idea: use the stalled site as a farm. There they grow fresh veggies to use at Riverpark, the restaurant next door.
While rooftop gardens are popping up all over the city (see the Brooklyn Grange for example), this one presented a special challenge: it needed to be portable read more…
On a trip to Finland a couple of summers ago, we visited the extraordinary Bovik Farm, where Sebastian Nurmi and his wife Ülle tend to indigenous breeds of cattle and sheep. We found many reasons to be knocked out – not only by the beautiful house and land, but by Nurmi’s story of a profound and unexpected life change.
While working as a fashion photographer living in Helsinki, in the 1980′s Nurmi bought a charming but derelict 40-acre farm in the province of Western Uusimaa. He planned to use it as a retreat and a rural base for his photography business. Over several years of going sporadically, he grew conscious of the need to tend the land, which was overgrown, with many fields let fallow. As he described it, it became absolutely clear to him that he should be working it. And he embraced the change. read more…
We’ve long been a fan of using the flowers and seed pods of farmer’s market vegetables and herbs for our flower arrangements. But we hadn’t thought of dill weed flowers until Terry Bordenave sent us an email:
We subscribe to a new, small CSA in northern Vermont (Deep Earth Farm) and in one of our weekly baskets of produce, Josh & Isaac included a bunch of dill weed. After stripping off the leaves to use in a meal or two, I was left with these striking seed heads. They reminded me of fireworks bursting – I’m a big fan of them and my husband is a member of the Pyrotechnics Guild of America and puts on amazing displays for our family – and I wanted to use them at the table somehow. This is what I came up with. I left them in these old medicine bottles for about a month, and they began to dry up and curl a bit. Before I tossed them on our compost pile, I saved some of their seeds for next year’s garden.
It reminds us of all the great “weeds” that can be flowers, with a slight shift of view.
We spend a lot of time thinking about how to live our lives in a way that honors our spirits, however you might define the word. But even though some may find it a bit grim, we also find ourselves thinking about how we honor each other in death as well. Sometimes we come across some truly beautiful ways to pay tribute to one another (and ourselves) that switch the focus on death from the sadness of loss to the beauty of memorial.
Take for example the enormous public chalk memorial for Jack Layton, former leader of the Canadian New Democratic Party. Toronto citizens covered the public square in front of city hall with messages for Layton, who passed away last month. While obviously the memorial isn’t permanent – it is as ephemeral as life – it’s the participatory and collective nature of the tribute that’s most touching and meaningful. It’s something any one of us could do.
We were also intrigued by the idea of some rather interesting biodegradable/ transforming urns for ashes, very different from the usual, homely vessel normally provided. You plant one in the ground, and it grows into a tree read more…
(Video link here.) We wish we could put that wondrous bell dress on right now and make music while we dance. What a way that would be to start the day!
…the Great Hurricane of 1938 roared ashore while Katherine Hepburn was out playing golf in Fenwick, Connecticut: there was no radar or satellite to warn of what appears to have been a Category 4 hurricane. Somehow, she rode out the storm, although it destroyed her family’s summer home. Most of her belongings were lost or destroyed; an Oscar she won was found in the rubble. read more…
(Video link here.) Here’s a glimpse of the interactive iPAD app that Björk recently created to be part of her recent album, as she tries to give create ever more dimensions in her music. Its introduction, narrated by David Attenborough, is a strange combination of beautiful, inspiring and ever-so-slightly hokey, in a good way. We like what she’s trying to do and the sentiment behind it…especially the idea of our selves as gateways:
Forget the size of the human body. Remember that you are a gateway between universal and the microscopic, the unseen forces that stir the depths of your innermost being and nature who embraces you and all that there is.
We laughed out loud at this week’s New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmur’s page by Paul Simms. It envisions God blogging the newly-created earth. God writes:
UPDATE: Pretty pleased with what I’ve come up with in just six days. Going to take tomorrow off. Feel free to check out what I’ve done so far. Suggestions and criticism (constructive, please!) more than welcome. God out.
And then God starts getting Comments, twenty-four of them. Our favorites:
Unfocussed. Seems like a mishmash at best. You’ve got creatures that can speak but aren’t smart (parrots). Then, You’ve got creatures that are smart but can’t speak (dolphins, dogs, houseflies). Then, You’ve got man, who is smart and can speak but who can’t fly, breathe underwater, or unhinge his jaws to swallow large prey in one gulp. If it’s supposed to be chaos, then mission accomplished. But it seems more like laziness and bad planning. read more…
(Video link here.) With or without the music: lovely, valiant life, which keeps happening ANYWAY, despite all the dark stuff going on. We can’t help thinking that ideas emerge into the world in a similar fashion…given even minimal nurturing, their natural impulse is to grow…
One of our favorite pieces by experimental composer Fast Forward is this zen wonder, created by Fast holding a drum in the rain. (Video link here.) We asked him how it came about:
Not far from my house is a fantastic riverbed rock quarry. The acoustics down there are incredible. One day, my friend and I went to play there and on came a rain shower…a frame drum played by the heavens…
Boy, is THAT living in the moment, making the most of what is on hand!
