Brasilian musician Hermeto Pascoal is famous for making music with unconventional objects. (Miles Davis called him “the most impressive musician in the world.” ) Here’s Pascoals astonishing Musica de Lagoa, made in a lagoon…the lagoon made into a instrument…
“Fascinated by the sounds of nature since he was a little boy, from a pumpkin mammon pipe he made a fife with which he used to play for the birds. He liked to spend hours in the lake playing sounds with the water, and also to pick every piece of scrap metal in his grandfather’s blacksmith shop to hang them in a rope to take sound of them. When he reached the age of 7-8 years old, he decided to try his father’s 8-bass accordion, and never stopped.”
Of course, it got us thinking about making our own music, somehow, and then we opened up a favorite book (that’s worth a post unto itself) to this: read more…
Anthony Giglio’s four-year-old son Marco spent last Sunday afternoon improvising his first snowman in Jersey City’s Overlook Park.
Once he had rolled and stacked three giant snowballs, he hunted for natural scraps around the park to bring it to life. Here is the mysterious process of Marco shifting his original creation into one that more fully expressed his vision: read more…
One of those anonymous chain emails arrived in our Inbox today, with a subject line that read “Playing With the Moon”. It’s a series of photo illusions that someone went to great pains to create. It LOOKS LIKE real – not Photoshopped – photos that they made with their kids, out on some beachy dune over several nights/days when the moon was out. The most beautiful ones look like silhouettes and have a strange, curiously old-fashioned magic…
…We were wondering who made them…and where they got the idea…and why… read more…
Amidst the images of devastation and loss coming out of Haiti yesterday were some symbols of of hope. Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres), whose medical facilities in Haiti were destroyed during the earthquake, were able to set up remarkable inflatable hospitals as triage centers ministering to devastated Port au Prince. They were there, even as other relief workers were finding it almost impossible to get through. It seems as though Doctors Without Borders is always “there” somehow.
In Greece many years ago I met a women who volunteered as a nurse for MSF. She would leave her life on the beautiful island of Chios on a moments notice to give service in the most dire of situations. What fierce stuff she is made of, I thought, unable to imagine having the strength to experience all that she had.
And although I often hear people talking about doing something rather than “just giving money”, sometimes giving money is the most effective thing we can do for the moment: a way of giving support to those who are there helping those in such dire need. read more…
The Known Universe is an amazing video that takes you from the Himalayas to the far reaches of space, to experience the afterglow of Big Bang, constellations, planets, quasars, the Milky Way, our solar system, and more…
It is compiled from the Digital Universe Atlas, a four-dimensional map of the universe maintained by the American Museum of Natural History, so it is all astronomically accurate. It is mind-expanding and beautiful, especially viewed full-screen.
It is one of the treasures I’ve found during the past year on kottke.org, one of my favorite blogs. I stop by daily to see what Jason Kottke has found, and although I may pass several posts by, just scanning the titles opens my view until I hit BIG with the likes of The Known Universe.
Melt one ice cube in a skillet by placing it in the sun. When melted, add 1 cup water and saute slowly — until water is transparent. Serve small portions, because this dish is rich as well as mouth-watering.
It’s from a book I had as a kid called Mud Pies and Other Recipes by Marjorie Winslow. “This is an outdoor cookbook,” reads the Foreword, “The market place, then, will be a forest or a sand dune or your own back yard.” It’s a cookbook for a kid’s world outdoors, even if the kid, like me, never actually acted out the recipes. Like the best children’s books, it fueled my imagination and painted a world rich with possibilities: read more…
Photographer Maria Robledo emailed me this picture of a winter crocus taken with her i-Phone, with the message: “Needs nothing but light to illuminate us.”
She was given crocus bulbs bought from the local farmer’s market as a house-warming present. She had only to place one root-side down in a bowl and expose it to light to awaken the flower within.
Several kinds of bulbs hold the potential to valiantly bloom in winter; the easiest are those that do not need a period of cold before exposure to sun. These include crocuses, hyacinths, paperwhites and daffodils. Here’s the simple method from Ed Hume Seeds: read more…
Dennison Lee is one of several people I know who have shifted their life radically recently, some in response to the recession and their work drying up, and some hoping to find a more satisfying way of living. Dennison, who had plenty of work as a transportation economist, is one of the latter. He spent about a year getting ready for his move “out”, saving money, and trying on different plans in his head before he hit on the right next step.
He gave up his New York City apartment to join forces with Jim Grillo, a farmer he knew from the Union Square Greenmarket and moved four hours upstate to Jim’s farm. He lives there in a gutted Airstream he brought on CraigsList for $3,800, and outfitted to be his spare living quarters.
Dennison has become a farmer and forager as he explores other ways of being in the world. He has intentionally embraced a demanding, deeply improvisational way of living read more…
If you ever need a big dose of delight and wonder, watch David Attenborough’s 4 minute beauty of a video about the bower bird of New Guinea, who creates astonishingly-decorated homes using careful arrangements of orchids, tree ferns, moss, the shiny wing covers of beetles, orange fruits, glowing red leaves, acorns, black fruits…with a clear sense of aesthetics!
It reminds me of the way kids create fantastical houses out of whatever they find. Only a bird did it….(At least one leading naturalist of the 19 century thought the bower birds little homes were made by a race of pygmies.) read more…
On the Finnair flight home from Finland, I glanced out the window to discover this incredible vision: a vast expanse of snow and glacier falling into the sea. The route home took us across the Arctic Circle and the coast of Greenland. That gives you an idea of how far North the amazing city of Helsinki is; it seems to defy its latitude with its temperate summer and Cosmopolitan ways. It IS a tiny metropolis, as they say, walkable everywhere, rich with beautiful design (down to the slightest detail) and wondrous foods. I am filled up with ideas and will soon blog the island summer houses, and crazy wild mushrooms and berries, and fierce artists, and a fashion photographer who turned into a farmer….
“I guess you win some and you lose some”, my friend Keith Stewart wrote in an email. “Last year was a winner. This year, I think, will not be.”
Like many farmers in the Northeast, Keith’s tomatoes have been hit hard by late blight, the same spore-born disease that caused the Irish Potato famine in the mid-19th century. The epidemic started with blighted seedlings sold to home gardeners by Walmart, Lowe’s, Kmart and Home Depot. Once the spores were released into the environment, relentlessly wet, windy weather encouraged them to spread and flourish: a perfect storm. A picture in the New York Times food section recently showed Keith hurling blighted tomato plants, that he’d grown from seed, into a deep pit (a grave, really). Keith estimates his losses will be around $40,000, which is not as bad as some.
Keith’s words remind me that to farm is to face uncontrollable forces – both natural and man-made – on a daily basis. Farmers solve problems, think on their feet, improvise constantly. Vulnerability and risk are part of the deal. read more…
I saw a photograph of one of Jim Denevan’s sand drawings and my head changed: every notion about sand and beach and drawing and playing shifted and opened up. I’d never thought about drawing in sand this way. Then I read the story behind his paintings, which I stumbled on on the artist’s website, and realized that this amazing process required no special tools, but a mighty amount of vision and patience, and the where-with-all to do it. Here’s what it said: read more…
I’m a big fan of rocks, which I haul home from the beach or country to use in various ways around my apartment, for Chicken Under a Brick Rock, or keep the air conditioner from rattling. They make beautiful, rather elemental doorstops. They’re also wonderul to look at with no use at all, piled up somewhere.
I know a guy who piled beautiful smallish round stones in shades of white and gray in the corner of his shower, to remind him the beach every morning…
There’s been a lot on the internet lately about guerrilla gardeners, people from all walks dedicated to stealthily transforming blighted, barren or plain ugly urban spots into planted oasis’s. These are often ordinary, middle-class souls fed up with the lack of nature and beauty in their urban landscape, and willing to break the law, shell out money for seeds, plants and supplies from their own pocket, and put themselves on the line (in effect, doing an end-run around bogged-down, bureaucratic local governments). read more…
