Kill the Baby

I'm done here. I'll leave the blog up but no amount of redesign and rethinking can give it purpose...I'm on to other things.

Take a look at Noteworthy and Note or No Shortage Of Beauty (photos).

If you are a fan of Bollywood here is a page of photos and songs.

For Goodness Sake

I like the new art essay by Maira Kalman at the NYT. Apparently these "blog posts" are done by hand and then scanned and put online by someone else. They are like children's books ... you learn something and have feelings about it when you are done reading. This one made me feel like there are people doing good things in the city ... doing their job right so it works for everyone. Wow, and I had seen pictures of egg digesters but did not know what they were.

Here are some more pictures of egg digesters around the world on flickr. And, if you actually don't know what an egg digester does try this brief explanation.

Leaves

{Fox Talbot, Branch of Leaves (Mercurialis) , 1839, photogenic drawing}

Leaves take all kinds of strange shapes, as if to invite us to examine them. Star-shaped, heart-shaped, spear-shaped, arrow-shaped, fretted, fringed, cleft, furrowed, serrated, sinuated; in whorls, in tufts, in spires, in wreaths endlessly expressive, deceptive, fantastic, never the same from footstalk to blossom; they seem perpetually to tempt our watchfulness, and take delight in outstripping our wonder.
~ John Ruskin

And if, through the summer, we have failed to notice they fall at our feet.

Pretty sure the original graphic and text came from A Journey Around My Skull

I'm Reading Jung

Click for larger view.
If Jung had been a cartoonist maybe his Red Book would be different.
Here is a cartoon by Austin Kleon that I found. I'm going to print it and slip it in the Jung book. I think Jung would have liked that...it can just be my little secret.

Inspired by Old Photographs

Artic Explorers by Adam Hancher - postercabaret.com click for larger

Indian Classical Music 101 - short!

Indian Raga does a lovely job of explaining the raga performance. Simply explained with several music examples by Rashid Khan (sublime). You know you want to understand raga. Now, I just need a pronounciation guide.

Films Worth Watching

I prefer the word film instead of movie. In my own mind I categorize the cinema that I love as film rather than movie. Movies are the things that have toy tie-ins or have stars like Will Smith or Jennifer Aniston. I just experienced two lovely films:

The Grocer's Son
A young man is thrown back into the home of his parents. He has dreams, expectations and no voice to express those things. It's a tale of woe with a heart. Pause. Put everything else aside and move in with the characters of this french village.

Dark Matter
Great understated performances by well known actors. Chinese students with ideas and vision work in the constrained atmosphere of a university cosmology department. The actual assemblage of the story is superb and sort of a meta form for the drama that unfolds. (Don't read the reviews...go into the story without ideas from someone else.)

ITunes goes Bollywood

Shocking!

When Jim brought the mail in yesterday he sounded strange as he handed me two plain white cardboard envelopes. "You have some rather strange looking mail here," he commented in an odd tone. I glanced at the suspicous items from ...Deviant Art, 1890 Beaver St. Ha, ha, ha...Jim's never been to deviant ART but I have.

No Regrets

A colleague of mine once hosted a visiting cartoonist from Scandinavia who was on a promotional tour. My colleague, who has a university job, a wife and children, was clearly a little wistful about the tour, imagining Brussels, Paris, and London, meeting new fans and colleagues and being taken out for beers every night. The cartoonist, meanwhile, looked forlornly around at his host’s pleasant row house and sighed, almost to himself: “I would like to have such a house.”

from Tim Kreigder in NYT via Austin Kleon