Swiss Chard
If I were a real photographer like Deron or Phil or Barry–I would take many pictures of Swiss Chard growing tall and back-lit by afternoon sun. I saw this batch at a local nursery and went home to get my point-and-shoot camera. That red! That green! The glow coming through made me imagine other worlds, and the way the sun looks from behind closed eyelids.
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Alexander McQueen’s final collection revealed, in Paris
Full set of photos here.
Alfa Romeo 2uettottanta
High Lonesome
Barry Hannah, the quintessentially Southern author of “Geronimo Rex” and “High Lonesome,” has died, The Associated Press reported. He was 67 and died on Monday at his home in Oxford, Miss. The Lafayette County coroner told The A.P. that Mr. Hannah died Monday afternoon of “natural causes,” but declined to elaborate until he had provided details to the author’s wife, Susan. The coroner said the death was not under investigation.
Thinking of all y’all
A Google image search turned up 191,000 hits for bacon bra.
early Shelby Cobra racer up for auction
Sky
Sky from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.
Read more about the project HERE.
Remembering Alexander McQueen
For Cindy
This is how it will be, our new life.
Edith Heath on Martha Stewart, 1989 — the materials should tell the story
I love Heath’s beautiful work. I’ll be linking to Florence Knoll and Eva Zeisel over the next few days.
Trailer for El Topo (Alejandro Jodorowsky. 1970)
The strangest movie I’d recommend?
Allen Klein presents an ABKCO Film.
Alifib
Saul Leiter: Pioneer of Colour Photography
Though photographic art historians consider that William Eggelston’s legendary colour show at the MOMA in 1979 was ground-breaking for the acceptance of colour photography, Saul Leiter is one of the true pioneers of colour and abstract photography. He started shooting in colour in 1948.
Saul Leiter treated the use of color in his photographs of the street and his surroundings as a painter of his time (1940s) would have done, and he helped lay the foundations for the development of the abstract notions of a photograph in the US.
And of course Blue In Green by the wonderful Miles Davis from the album Kind of Blue.
(via altfotonet)
Sorry, the Baby Jesus did a runner!
Regardless of what this holiday means to you, I hope you all have a peaceful one.
Christmas Memory: bb guns
One Christmas, my brother and I got Daisy bb guns. We wanted them bad. We couldn’t wait to shoot them, but it was mid-winter in Rockford. Daddy set us up a stack of boxes packed with newspaper in the basement with a target stapled to the side. It wasn’t long before we bored of straight shootin’ and opted up for tricks. We went upstairs, stole Mom’s hand-mirror off her vanity, and commenced fancy-shootin’ backwards Annie Oakley style. My brother’s first shot riccocheted off the blocks of the basement wall and hit my brother in the back of his head. Didn’t hurt him. Didn’t break the skin. But how he howled. It stung! We could have put an eye out!
I invite all clusterflockers/readers near and far to tell us a Christmas story over the next few days. It would be the best gift we could give each other.
the new golden ratio
In four experiments aimed at finding “an ideal facial feature arrangement,” US and Canadian researchers asked students to compare color photographs of the same woman’s face, in which the vertical distance between the eyes and mouth, and horizontal distance between the eyes, had been doctored using Photoshop.
The features — eyes, mouth, nose, contour and hair — remained the same and a woman’s face was only compared to her own, never to another’s.
Students looked at different pictures of the same woman’s face laid out side by side and selected the face they found more attractive.
“Angelina Jolie does not have golden length and width ratios,” he said.
“Elizabeth Hurley gets the golden ratio for length but is different from the width golden ratio by one percent.”
But Canadian country pop musician Shania Twain has “both the length and width ratios.”
Michael Kenna’s Hokkaido
Michael Kenna. Fading Light, Furano, Hokkaido, Japan. 2004.
Ordinarily I’d not want to follow so swiftly on Deron’s post about the Andy Goldsworthy documentary, but if I don’t do it now, I might be some time.
A short while ago Phil Bebbington sent me a link to this documentary interview with photographer Michael Kenna. I found Michael Kenna’s Hokkaido calming and beautiful, and I want to share it.
“Even in the midst of a storm, it’s a wonderful place to come to ground, in a sense.”
Rivers and Tides
We watched Rivers and Tides last night, a documentary about the environmental sculpture of Andy Goldsworthy, thanks to Cindy’s suggestion, and it was so beautiful it made me cry like a baby.
My Favorite Pit Toilet
Ever. (Tapley Woods. Jo Daviess County, Illinois. US of A.)
2010 Triumph Thruxten SE
‘the weirdest thing’
Dr Tandberg said: “I agree with everyone in the science community that this light was the weirdest thing. I have never seen anything like this ever.
“It may have been anything from an exploding missile whose launch went wrong – to a comet or other celestial object that for some reason has been behaving strangely.
Hat tip Andrea
For Andrew
“Of course from one point of view she was right about the Church, which grew so far, almost at once, from anything which can have been intended, and became so blood-stained and persecuting and cruel and war-like and made small and trivial things so important, and tried to exclude everything not done in a certain way and by certain people, and stamped out heresies with such cruelty and rage. And this failure of the Christian Church, of every branch of it in every country, is one of the saddest things that has happened in all the world. But it is what happens when a magnificent idea has to be worked out by human beings who do not understand much of it but interpret it in their own way and think they are guided by God, whom they have not yet grasped. And yet they had grasped something, so that the Church has always had great magnificence and much courage, and people have died for it in agony, which is supposed to balance all the other people who have had to die in agony because they did not accept it, and it has flowered up in learning and culture and beauty and art, to set against its darkness and incivility and obscurantism and barbarity and nonsense, and it has produced saints and martyrs and kindness and goodness, though these have also occurred freely outside it, and it is a wonderful and most extraordinary pageant of contradictions, and I, at least, want to be inside it, though it is foolishness to most of my friends.”
Rose Macauley, The Towers of Trebizond.
Pocket calendar / sketchbook 2010 by Peter Biľak
Limited edition of the pocket-size, no-nonsense Typotheque calendar and sketchbook. Main features are: week overview on a double page, year overview, 12 different pre-printed grids in the sketchbook. International holidays (multi-religious), design events and other days of interest are indicated on the index page, as well as on day overviews. Vinyl cover offers extra protection, and the book is specially bound to ensure that it lies flat when opened.
Chart Showing the Aggregate Number of Idiots and the Proportion of Males and Females, White or Colored, Native or Foreign, at the Ninth Census 1870; also the increase since 1860.
Excerpted from the Statistical atlas of the United States based on the results of the ninth census 1870 with contributions from many eminent men of science and several departments of the government Comp. under the authority of Congress by Francis A. Walker, M. A., superintendent of the ninth census.
(by way of Eminent Man of Science and Art Graham Parker; entire census report at loc.gov)
Brother Blue is gone.
I will try and write about his impact on me. Meantime, this from the Boston Globe.