notebook/daybook
The art of Gene Beery.
Via Nabil Maynard, a guide to starting a blog from Ben Werdmuller.
Fascinating and unreleased before music by Otto Sidharta, pionneer of Indonesian electronic music. Electronic compositions that integrated natural sounds and urban sounds to this extent were extremely rare at the time, which gives them a unique form of intensity.
Making time this morning for this magnificent Rothko via Daily Rothko.
In 1914, the Austrian actress Tilla Durieux was driven from Berlin to Paris some 15 times to sit for a portrait by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. In the resulting painting, Durieux looks serenely grave, fixing her gaze somewhere outside its shimmer of rose and honeyed tones. Writing years later, she described the severely arthritic artist. As he was wheeled into the room by a nurse, Durieux was “flabbergasted” by Renoir’s hands. His right, she noted, had been frozen by the arthritis in the gesture of holding a paintbrush; the left was contorted in such a way that it perfectly held a palette.
Fascinating nugget from this piece here at Art In America.
Some 2,300 light years from Earth lies the pulsar PSR B1257+12. It flashes 161 times per second and has been nicknamed “Lich” after an undead creature in western folklore. It is orbited by three rocky, terrestrial planets named Phobetor, Draugr and Poltergeist.
Love that cover. Via 70s Sci Fi Art.
The abstract art of Frank Bowling.
18th C tarot deck used by the first professional tarot reader.
Influencing Machines are described by their troubled inventors as complex structures, constructed of “boxes, cranks, levers, wheels, buttons, wires, batteries and the like.” Sometimes these devices are thought to be their doubles, unconscious projections of their fragmented bodily experience. Patients will typically invoke all the powers known to technology to explain their obscure workings. Nevertheless, they always transcend attempts at giving a coherent account of their function: “All the discoveries of mankind,” Tausk asserts, “are regarded as inadequate to explain the marvelous powers of this machine.”
Astronomers have observed the brightest flash of light ever seen, from an event that occurred 2.4 billion light years from Earth and was likely triggered by the formation of a black hole.
I’ve barely moved from the office chair in days, aside from breaks to try and saw down some bits of tree, and my back is killing me and my eyes are bleary. Show me the brightest light in the universe, please.
In this exhibition, (Tom) Sachs investigates the accepted understandings, assumptions, epistemology, and consensus of what constitutes a spaceship. By tracing its evolving historical and linguistic understanding, the artist explores a spaceship’s physical, metaphysical, and spiritual possibilities.
And, you know, fun stuff, but I was immediately reminded of British model maker Martin Bower, who specialised in science fiction tv and film.
Images from a new book about the Japanese folklore of the yokai.
Wonderful essay by David Milch on his language choices in DEADWOOD.
Great longread Mark Pilkington piece on Joe Meek through ten tracks, which does not use Telstar but does, blessedly, use the transformative I Hear A New World.
The horizontal waveform has become a ubiquitous visual signifier of audio. It was popularized in particular by SoundCloud, but existed long before that in various digital audio tools, and can be tracked back further to the height of the multi-band stereo-system equalizer in the 1970s. The waveform’s deployment in a New York Times feature story this week (about intercepted phone calls home from Russian military personnel carrying out the campaign in Ukraine) turns the now generic symbol into an urgent harbinger — part surveillance sigil, part ethereal lifeline, part literal cry for help.
Amazing images from a photobook by Christian Spencer:
“….acclaimed figurative painter Eric Fischl declared Aleah Chapin “the best and most disturbing painter of flesh alive today…” The art of Aleah Chapin.
“Deep in the Ecuadorian Amazon, an organization called Yakum is seeding a better, cleaner, greener future for the indigenous Siekopai” – Planting The Future.
The act of writing itself takes the least amount of time for me. For Beautiful Country, I spent three years (and one might say, most of my life) thinking about the book, researching through my diary and retracing my steps, and processing how I wanted to write it. But actually writing it took me just shy of three months. The long initial marination stage is awful and terrifying, because it looks and feels exactly like procrastination.
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Kathy Hinde – Earthquake Mass Re-imagined, 2022:
Earthquake Mass Re-imagined from Kathy Hinde on Vimeo.
Hinde consulted with Mexico’s top seismologists to inform the artwork. Seismic data from the earthquake that shook Mexico on 19th September 2017 shapes the behaviour and playback of the record players. As seismicity rises, the vocals become more fragmented and shift in density. As the earth re-settles, the voices are reconfigured in a new way, yet remain disjointed.
The pure, untreated vocals on the record players are accompanied by a textural, spatialised soundscape created from processes inspired by seismological research. Hinde resonated the vocal recordings in locations with significant historical seismic activity in Mexico, including 16th century monasteries that sustained damage from the 2017 earthquake. She further displaced the recordings by re-recording them travelling through the earth at relevant locations in Mexico. Seismic data has also been directly translated into sound within human hearing range.
New project announced in the newsletter yesterday.
New song by the excellent Birds Of Passage.
New winners of annual Drone Photo Awards:
Tripped over this George Saunders quote today:
When I was a kid I had one of these Hot Wheels devices designed to look like a little gas station. Inside the gas station were two spinning rubber wheels. One’s little car would weakly approach the gas station, then be sent forth by the spinning rubber wheels to take another lap around the track or, more often, fly out and hit one’s sister in the face.
A story can be thought of as a series of these little gas stations. The main point is to get the reader around the track; that is, to the end of the story. Any other pleasures a story may offer (theme, character, moral uplift) are dependent on this.
“A series of little petrol stations” is a nice way to image a story that’s getting tricky.
New images of the Tarantula Nebula, which is of course mostly gas. 30 Doradus is a stellar nursery, which I guess is a series of gas stations.
When stars are born, clouds of gas and dust that were not incorporated into the final stellar system remain. Moving on an orbit around the Milky Way that takes some 230 million years to complete, the Solar System encounters these clouds, one of which is the Local Interstellar Cloud, although as Brandt told Richard Stone in the Science article, we really know so little about the cloud environment that our conception is on the order of a child’s sketch.
Or, indeed, on the order of a child’s Hot Wheels construction.
Martian dunes. ” The image was taken using the red-green-blue filter on the camera, giving the sand a blue appearance.” So, not true colour. More like storytelling.
But there’s a specific incident in (Frank) Herbert’s life that seems to have set him off in this direction. He made his living as a reporter before his fiction writing took off. In 1957, when he was in his 30s, he was sent to write about a system of dunes in Oregon that were migrating and therefore endangering towns.
The US Department of Agriculture were using grasses to try and stabilise the dunes. And Herbert had been really struck by this – modifying an ecology to achieve a goal, as opposed to using technology, such as big fences.