notebook/daybook
Chris Korda, via Artforum.
Today’s word is necrobotics.
Mechanical engineers from Rice University have actually turned spider cadavers into what they call “necrobots,” able to function as mechanical grippers.
There is, of course, video of a dead spider being puppeted to act as the sort of claw crane that fails to pluck a teddy bear out of the box at the seaside arcade.
Necrobotics. Good morning.
A survey of recent collections of micro-fictions: also referred to as flash fictions, short-shorts and other terrible terms.
Produced by the U.S. Naval Ordnance Laboratory in 1964, It Started with Muybridge begins with a voiceover proclaiming the center’s mission: “research and development for tomorrow’s weapons”. The future’s bombs, this training film claims, will be detonated atop the shoulders of yesterday’s “photographer extraordinary”, Eadweard Muybridge. His famous sequential studies of animal movement innovated photography as a tool for motion analysis — the field that excites these ordnance laboratorians most
During what he thought would be a routine storm-chasing expedition in Virginia last week, photographer Jason Rinehart visited an overlook within the Blue Ridge Mountains. He was hoping to capture the ominous shelf cloud leading that night’s torrent but instead found himself witnessing an unusually lucky sight: as the rain broke during twilight, a double rainbow emerged over the horizon, an already stunning phenomenon made more serendipitous when it was punctured by a bright lightning bolt in the distance.
The Utopian Avant-Garde: Soviet Film Posters of the 1920s.
Michael Velliquette’s Meditative Paper Sculptures.
THE END OF THE WORLD, Jack Pierson, via.
The Fall as sound / the sound of The Fall: Simon Reynolds on top ruminative form.
A clip from Peter Greenaway’s THE FALLS:
A recent (?) production of Beckett’s ALL THAT FALL. (I was looking for the MacWhinnie original)
Headline of the day: Maurizio Cattelan Faces Plagiarism Lawsuit Over Banana Duct-Taped To Wall.
A Temporary Sanctuary at Hitokotonushi Shrine Provides Fresh Water for Japan’s Honeybees. This has me wanting to build a new water feature near the mini-greenhouse and potting area in the garden.
Short interview with editor of interesting-looking new travel magazine OPEN SPACES.
“Transtemporal care”:
“Can one really care that in about a million years the human species will, one way or another, become extinct?”48 To address the problem of individual disconnectedness of interest from possible peoples in the far future – the difficulty of “car[ing] for something so abstract as indeterminate distant future generations considered holistically or collectively”49 – he suggests “global human civilization” as the object of care, setting a future temporal limit of five thousand years based on a past cultural history of the same time length.50 “Global civilization,” he concludes, “can serve as a surrogate for Unknown Future generations because it is scaled proportionately to the effects of our present actions on the global climate
Just like with a novel, a good improv show is about telling a compelling story. A date gone wrong. A promotion gone awry. The camping trip with an uninvited bear. The only difference is that the comedians on stage don’t know the story they’re telling until it unfolds. But even to that, taking improv encouraged me to write without an outline in mind. With Keya Das’s Second Act, I just began to write and got to know the characters as I went, much like I would in an improv show. I didn’t know where the book was going, and the story was better off for it.
It’s not just broad concepts either. There are specific maneuvers within the confines of a show that teach you how to be a better writer. A core tenet of improv is being able to execute a well-placed callback: Essentially, a comedian takes a minor detail introduced early in the show and brings it back later and elevates it, surprising the audience. It’s a nice treat for show watchers truly paying attention.
Useful – I once knew a writer with a background in improv, and I can see some of them in this — and ties back to writing as gardening.
MONUMENT 337 : AMOTIK doesn’t want to embed, so go listen to its sweeping ambient landfall here at Monument.
Since its inauguration in 2013, Studio for Propositional Cinema had produced work that might be described as paracinematic or paraphotographic—engaging with the material constraints and possibilities of both mediums without necessarily taking a photograph or making a film. For this reason, the collective’s current solo exhibition at Museum Abteiberg, “The Camera of Disaster,” presents an immediate surprise to the viewer: a series of sensuous, large-format black-and-white photographs following three characters through post-apocalyptic land- and cityscapes.
Well, my friends and I used to like to argue about Thomas Pynchon. Some loved him, some hated him. Literary discussions over coffee or drinks late at night. I thought, what if Annie Savoy loves Pynchon and Crash Davis hates Pynchon, and they get into arguments about him? Then we see them each re-reading Pynchon, and by the end we see them switch views on his work, because they’re falling in love. I cut that out of the script. It was too much, we didn’t need it. But the Pynchon reference was in the speech until the day we were shooting it.
Then, we got a notification from a lawyer representing Pynchon threatening us, saying we were defaming him. I was shocked, because (a) how did the lawyer find the script? (b) we weren’t defaming him, it was going to turn into an argument with the characters switching sides; and (c) I thought Pynchon had a sense of humor, because he always had Professor Irwin Corey accept his awards, which I felt was really cool.
New Sarah Davachi album coming:
Venice is cursed. I walked cursed Venice in a cloud of confusion. Why did so many people bring so many roller suitcases? Did they not know they were coming to Venice? Did they not know Venice has a stone-stepped bridge every fifty yards? Sweat soaked beneath the savage sun, they heaved their suitcases — all of which were big enough to hide a dismembered body or two — up and down and huffed and seemed distraught at the amount of heaving required to make headway.
Virtual Ink’ is the culmination of almost seven years of development. Building a bespoke process in custom software in Virtual Reality, the series is almost exclusively drawn in a simulated environment. The possibilities of drawing within the digital landscape extend traditional painting approaches with new spatial orientations. Every stroke of virtual ink is produced in three dimensions, rendering the work almost sculptural in its creation.
I just love this, so I have to save it: Todd Sanders, 1974, via 70s Sci-Fi Art.
Similarly, I’m delighted by this cover by by Janet Hansen & Tyler Spangler, found via LitHub:
Fiddleheads, F*ck Ups, and Life on the Farm: an excerpt from the book PIG YEARS by Ellyn Gaydos. Which I suspect I will now have to read, because this was a really nice piece.
A guide to planting a pollinator garden, which probably has very little to do with storytelling or culture but was useful for me. Especially in combination with the list of wildflowers native to Essex provided by the Essex Wildlife Trust, which I’ve been supporting for years. I bet you that, wherever you are, you can find a local group doing similar work. However: ancient native plants have great names, resonant of folklore and the old times. Restharrow, Dog’s Mercury, loosestrife and cleavers, lady’s bedstraw and enchanter’s nightshade, the bog Asphodel and the Melancholy Thistle
Names to conjure stories with.
