The Beach Boys Shred I Get Around

Via Tim!

The Landfill Harmonic Orchestra

The World is Now in Color: Calvin & Hobbs

Click for a large image.

Native American Portraits from c. 1905

Below (and after the jump) is a small sampling of a series of great portraits of Native Americans at In Focus, The Atlantic's photography blog.  The full series, posted a few months ago, is worth seeing.

"Lies I've Told My 3 Year Old Recently"

Trees talk to each other at night.
All fish are named either Lorna or Jack.
Before your eyeballs fall out from watching too much TV, they get very loose.
Tiny bears live in drain pipes.
If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub against the sky.
The moon and the sun had a fight a long time ago.
Everyone knows at least one secret language.
When nobody is looking, I can fly.
We are all held together by invisible threads.
Books get lonely too.
Sadness can be eaten.
I will always be there

A poem by Raul Gutierez at the blog Heading East, via Boing Boing.

Russian Landscape Artist Konstantin Kryzhitsky and Knowing the Artist

James Gurney, who writes the great art blog Gurney Journey, asks what a painting can tells us about an artist.  Speculating from the painting Peyzazh 1895 (below) by the Russian painter Konstantin Kryzhitsky,  of whom gurney was unaware (me to), Gurney asserts Kryzhitsky "had a deep soul, a love of mystery, melancholy, and music, and a keen sense of nature's moods that must have come from long walks through the countryside. This painting couldn't have been done by a flippant, urbane, or shallow person."

I'm not sure that so much about an artist can be gleaned from a single painting.  I certainly have my doubts that Kryzhitsky was not urbane.  Assuming the artist is not attempting to mislead about herself or himself -- and is, of course, not a forger or a machine -- still we may know very little of an artist from a work or series of works.  Of course, it depends on the work.  I could say very little about Ellsworth Kelly, for instance, just knowing some of his work.  As to Kryzhitsky, taking the assumption that he puts himself genuinely into his work, and looking at many of his landscapes, I see someone awed by nature both as to its beauty and scale, someone who wanted to show humankind as small in relation to that vastness, someone who had trained as an academic painter and had extraordinary technical skill, and someone who very sensitive and smart.

Peyzazh 1895 is, to my lights, a fantastic painting: from the illusion of smoke from the break in the trees, from the juxtaposition of built and natural world, to the question it raises of whether one is entering or leaving the estate, to the feeling of coldness and sense of place so real (but not slavishly realistic) that I can feel being there.  This last point flows readily across many of his works -- below the break a sample (and final comment):

Sculpting the Aging Process

Peter Han calls himself a designer not an artist.  He is an artist.

In the video below he not only demonstrates his art, but, wittingly or not, gives a clear sense of what makes art, literally and figuratively.

Han's incredible work can be seen on his website and through some screenshots at Colossal.

The Bead Chain Experiment

Our physical world is simply an amazing world.

Via Tim! from 3 Quarks Daily.

Excellent Advice from Galileo Feynman Jezebel

This is not the Dick you're looking for

What with Anthony Weiner's weiner in the news again, Erin Gloria Ryan has come forward with some timely advice at Jezebel in an article entitled "Should You Send a Lady a Dick Pic? A Guide for Men."

The answer appears to be "no." Who knew?

I assure you the article and its comments are worth reading in full.

Having Learned We are Publishing Again ...

Leonardo Sagan is now hastily rushing back. Yep, things are really heating up around here.

The Time Obama Was Mistaken for a Waiter at a Tina Brown Book Party

I thought this note at The Atlantic harking back to a 2008 article by Katie Rosman in The Wall Street Journal -- and accompanied by the perfect picture (from Kevin Lemarque for Reuters) -- expressed the issue of frequent racial assumptions with clarity and brevity:

"In less than six years, Obama has gone from being mistaken for a waiter among the New York media elite, to the president-elect. What a country."
      ...
And yet even as that country elected and then reelected its first black president, the easy assumptions about who black men are have yet to vanish.

(Link from Miss Cellania; interior quote from Rosman's article.)

Winter is Coming Apparently Sometime Far Away from Now

I've been intermittently reading the Game of Thrones (er, I mean A Song of Fire and Ice) series, having watched the HBO drama.  I whole heartedly agree with this review, except for the part about I am not going to read it anymore.  That's because I knew this was nonsense coming in -- it's a soap opera in fantasy trappings -- but it's my damn soap opera and I'm hooked.

And, yes, the majority of the best characters are dead:

Comic-Con 2013: In Memoriam

Exciting Blogging Action Returns

After a short hiatus, I thought I should get back to the blog.  This is, after all, our 1 year anniversary.  Previous calculations about how long we had been publishing have proven to be inaccurate.