Yamamoto’s Ephemeral Salt Sculptures “Futile Yet Necessary to His Healing”

(Video link here.) There is something very moving about watching artist Motoi Yamamoto painstakingly make his intricate, lacelike installations out of salt…perhaps because they are at once so intricate and so ephemeral. We discovered that the ordinary material we all have on hand is, in Japanese culture, a traditional symbol for mourning and purification. And that Motoi Yamamoto…

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2 Minute Meditation: Breathing with the Earth

(Video link here.) We are stunned by this incredibly beautiful animation from NASA of the 12-month cycle of the Earth’s plant life, on land and in the ocean. As the year progresses, we see plant life following the increased sunlight northward or southward causing the Earth’s greening to move as though it were breathing…

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Linda Rodin on Finding Style in Aging + Face Balms Mixed in a Coffee Cup

Linda Rodin, a late-sixty-something former model and fashion stylist is known for her signature style that revolves around a simple three element-formula: her long silvery gray hair, oversize glasses and red lipstick — always. She created her popular Olio Lusso Face Oil, which sells for $170 per ounce, by mixing the oils she used frequently “in a coffee cup…like salad dressing,…

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Morning Practice: Reading a Poem…..Again

For some time, our morning practice, before email or anthing digital,  has been to read a poem aloud (sometimes with a friend).  Recently, we decided to try reading the same poem every morning for a week. We discovered that each day, we’d hear it differently and find something new in those same few lines, as…

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The Words We Found for Paris 11/15

We are heartsick about the attacks in Paris a city that, after one visit, makes a person feel like it is somehow theirs, so perfect are its memories.  We have been casting about for some words that shed light on what seems like a time of such profound darkness…

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Apple Cider Syrup + Jam

The other day, our friends at Essex Farm laid a windfall of apple cider on us: pure liquid apple with pleasingly earthy undertones of seeds and stem, or perhaps a wooden cider mill. It was beautiful stuff but too much to consume before it would start fermenting. How to capture that “apple” for the rest of…

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Yonic is the New Phallic

We have the word phallic in our repertoire, an appropriate word we can use at museums when pointing out that the artist was clearly obsessed with dick, but what about its counterpart? When you look at something and the folds are just so familiar and we all know what we’re looking at…What’s that called?

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Rugs Comfort +Transform, from Haute Moderne to Refugee Tent

This mid-century moderne room of colorful flat-weave rugs laid end-to-end breaks from the usual restraint of moderne decor. Patterns of rugs create a space that is welcoming, cosy, colorful, and mutes the difference between seat and floor, no matter where you are. They emulate nomadic Arabic tradition, where rugs are used to create spaces to gather upon, and even the walls of shelters.

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What If You Could Talk to Your Younger Self?

(Video link here.) Stoney Emshwiller was 18 years old when he recorded himself interviewing his older self in 1977. Thirty-eight years later, a 56-year-old Stoney answered his younger self’s questions, on film. Here’s a trailer of “Later That Same Life“, the astonishing film he is raising money to finish.

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200-Year-Old Mechanical Gifs are Like Mandalas

In 1829, a Belgian physicist devised a form of animation that is akin to our modern-day gifs: a spinning disk patterned with small repeating illustrations, attached to a handle that allowed it to spin and “animate” the imagery. Due to the rapid progression of technology, phenakistoscopes’ popularity lasted only a couple of years, yet they yielded…

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